02/10/06 - Simon Carless

DICE: Moore Discusses Xbox 360 Shortages, Live Arcade

In his keynote on the second day of the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Microsoft's Peter Moore was ostensibly tasked with talking about Microsoft's renewed attentions to the PC market, something most recently exemplified by the announcement that Halo 2 is coming exclusive to Windows Vista.

Gamasutra will have a full write-up of Moore's session, including in-depth comments on that portion of his speech, in the near future. However, the most immediately interesting comments appear to have been related to Xbox 360 matters.
In comments reported by biz site Next-Gen, Moore suggested of the severe and actually continuing Xbox 360 shortage, suggesting: "Within the next four to six weeks, anybody will be able to walk into a store and buy an Xbox 360."

Microsoft is now focusing on a target of 4.5 million to 5.5 million Xbox 360 consoles by the end of the fiscal year in June, after its initial 90 day target of 2.75 to 3 million consoles shipped appeared out of reach, mainly due to unspecified manufacturing slowness.

In addition, Moore revealed that there have been around 2 million Xbox 360 Live Arcade downloads thus far, and the average conversion rate for games is 20 percent from demo download to game purchase, with Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved reaching a spectacular 36 percent conversion rate.

This is a gigantic figure (admittedly spurred by hardcore early adopters) compared to the conventional 1 to 2 percent for PC casual titles, and bodes well for the future of online downloadable content for consoles, for which Sony is rumored to be adding similar functionality to a relatively robust PlayStation 3 online platform.