[QUOTE="Ninja-Hippo"] This part was interesting:
"… Not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control," the former Xbox and Sega US head commented. "The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we were still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down.
"So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes."
He seems to be saying that they left the original xbox purely because they were losing so much money on it. I dont see how they could possibly be spending $70 on a 10gig hard drive though.
darthogre
Now that's very intresting........but I've heard countless times they gave up on the Xbox because they didn't want to spend money on both Xbox and X360 development. then there were those that say MS killed Xbox because there was no way it was going to be hugely successful so in the end MS thought it was best to release first to better compete against Sony. I personally believe MS killed the original xbox prematurely to force xbox owners to upgrade to X360. No more games means they have to get a new console......MS was right in a sense because just about all hardcore Xbox owners went out and bought a X360 in the first 2 years. It's funny, EXACTLY what Moore said is what has been pointed out in pretty much all of the 10,000 theads cows have made the statement "MS will kill the 360 early because they killed the Xbox early" argument. The xbox went from conception to release in 19 months(ie MS decided to make it roughly when the PS2 launched in Japan and came out 12 months after the PS2 launched in the US...that's about half the time it normally takes). They had to use nearly all off the shelf parts in the machine, and therefore were at the mercy of the makers of the pieces to pay whatever they decided to charge. The gpu in the Xbox cost them about as much in 2004 as it did in 2001 even though it cost Nividia a fraction of what it originally did to produce it. ATI and IBM's willingness to sell MS the intellectual property of the CPU and GPU designs is what prompted them to go with those companies.
I don't know if I buy the "it was just too popular and we were losing too much money". The console was 4 years old......you are telling me the cost was still above $200? Maybe it's just me but $70 for an 8 gig hardrive (even 4 years ago) sounds a little far fetched. That's NOT what he said. MS had to either charge more than the PS2 to not lose money on the hardware, or sell the machine at a loss for the entire gen. The retail price had to keep dropping and the cost to manufacture it didn't. The more they sold the more money they lost.
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