14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Ballmer, the boss of Microsoft, has said that the Xbox 360 is, partly because of the new Kinect motion tracking technology, no longer just a gaming console and that the company has plans to expand its audience and make it a center for all things linked to entertainment.
Speaking publicly after the CES trade show, Steve Ballmer has talked about Microsoft's business and touched upon the Xbox 360 game console, saying, “Xbox isn’t a gaming console. Xbox is a family entertainment center. It’s a place to socialize. It’s a place to watch TV. We have Hulu coming. It’s the only system where you are the controller. Your voice, your gestures, your body.”
He added a bit of personal detail by saying that, “I think about my own family. My wife used to say, ‘No, no, that’s the machine the boys use,’ and now she says, ‘Yeah, I want to go watch movies. Let’s go play the dance game.'”
The Microsoft leader believes that the Xbox 360 is succeeding in the marketplace because of the fact that it has morphed since release in order to appeal to a broader number of customers, aiming for demographics beyond the young video game interested males.
Kinect has been a success, with Microsoft reporting at CES that it has managed to sell more than 8 million of the devices before the end of 2010, above its own internal predictions.
The Xbox 360 itself has done pretty well in the last few months, managing in December 2010 to be the only gaming console that has posted an increase in sales over the same period in 2009, according to the data offered by the NPD Group for North America.
For 2011, Microsoft says that it is aiming to deliver more core-focused Kinect-powered video games, although the technology is not included in Gears of War 3, probably the biggest title for the platform.