2006 and Beyond
When I was at E3, my sense of the show was that Xbox 360 games were everywhere, and most of them looked very, very good. I don’t remember seeing many Xbox titles, and the ones I did see looked extremely poor in comparison to the 360 titles—particularly the games from 2K Sports.
That made me curious.
The software transition from current-gen to next-gen is always a touchy subject—abandoning a console is something that is going to make people angry, no matter how it’s handled. To lower manufacturing costs, though, the user base has to be ramped quickly—the faster it ramps, the more flexibility it creates in terms of pricing, and in the consumer market, pricing leverage is a critical factor.
To find out how the software transition was going, I checked the EB Games website and did a tally of all Xbox and Xbox 360 games listed. What I saw surprised me. Take a look at all games listed for future release (sorry for the ugly formatting here, but importing tables into Blogger is essentially impossible, as far as I can tell):
------------May---June---July---Aug---Sep---Oct---Nov---Dec---2007+--Tot
Xbox360----2------10-----5-------8------3------11------6-----0-------40------85
Xbox---------6-------8-----4-------5------5-------3------0-----0--------0-------31
Publishers will shift almost all of these dates, so it’s far from an exact picture. There’s plenty of water there, though, to at least sense the tide. 45 Xbox 360 games are scheduled for release before the end of the year, but only 31 Xbox titles. Almost half of that 31 will be shipping by the end of June. After that, the 360 titles are listed in a 2-1 ratio for the end of the year.
In other words, in about two months, the transition from Xbox to Xbox 360 is essentially over.
2007? You can see for yourself. 40 titles listed for the 360. Zero listed for the Xbox. Again, that doesn’t mean that absolutely nothing will come out for the original Xbox next year, but even with a few additions, game releases for the Xbox are going to be very scarce.
Let’s take a look at another table (in two parts, due to the width), this one by genre:
------------Shoot---Action---Fight---Sim---Strat---MMO---Sport---Puz---RPG
Xbox360----16------27--------2--------1------3----------2------11------0---------5
Xbox----------1------15---------1--------0------0----------0-------8------0---------0
------------Advent---Race---Air Combat---Dance---Platform
Xbox360----8---------6------------1------------1---------2
Xbox---------1---------5------------0------------0---------0
These are all listed games separated by genre. “Action” is somewhat of a catch-all category for the release listings, since both first person and third person games are included. Even with that skew, however, there are some interesting items here. First, what’s still coming out for the Xbox almost entirely consists of action games, sports, and racers—28 of 31 total titles are in those three groups.
There are a surprising number of adventure games (not necessarily adventure in the Dreamcatcher sense, but still adventures) in the pipeline for the 360. Still, though, Shooters and Action games represent roughly 50% of the future release list.
And even though the 360 has plenty of power to handle simulations and strategy games, there are very few in development. Even with enough system horsepower, the lack of a mouse-type controller is still a big issue.
