40% Of Xbox Activity “Non-Game”

Apparently it is as hard to recognise that the Xbox 360 is moving beyond its gaming roots as it is to accept that the metaphor about slow-boiling a frog is false.  That seems to be the message of the opening two paragraphs of a pre-E3 blog from Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communications, Frank Shaw.

Microsoft are trying to arrive at the goal of placing a games console at the heart of family home entertainment from the opposite direction that Sony tried with the PS3.  With their need to get as many Blu-ray players installed in homes as they could, Sony began by selling the PS3 as a full-featured, and expensive, home entertainment hub.

Whereas Microsoft started with a gaming console and have grown its value proposition as a home entertainment device by taking advantage of the increasingly widespread and capable network infrastructure.

While much of the blog post is, unsurprisingly, what you might call ‘PR fluff’, there are a few statements that might be interesting from our gamer’s viewpoint.  Let’s start with the line ‘abbreviated’ to provide the headline above:

While people are still playing a ton of video games, 40 percent of all Xbox activity now is non-game.

He says the average Xbox 360 is now used for “video consumption” for around 30 hours a month.  No indication is given about whether those are U.S.-only figures or exactly what that video consumption is.  If that’s video content purchased or subscribed to via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace or the services like Sky and ESPN those are good figures, which are apparently “growing fast”.  If, however, it also somehow includes activities such as people streaming DVD rips from their PC to big-screen TV it is perhaps less impressive.

What that also tells us though is that the average Xbox 360, among whatever population the data is gathered from, is being used for around 75 hours a month.  That is more than one tenth of a month and hence, on average, around 2.5 hours per day, every day.

Let’s look at some more numbers from the blog:

…we’ve sold more than 53 million Xbox 360 consoles, and Xbox has been the top-selling console in the last year.

Compound statements like that start the mental alarm bells ringing because for both halves of the statement to be true the numbers have to come from different datasets.  You might have noticed our recent post that reported the latest sales data for the consoles.

The “more than 53 million Xbox 360 consoles” is clearly a reference back to Microsoft’s latest quarterly data which records worldwide sales of 53.6m.  From that same post of ours you can also see that worldwide sales of the PS3 topped those of the Xbox 360 by 1 million over the last four quarters, 14.3m vs. 13.3m.

Therefore the second half of Shaw’s statement “Xbox has been the top-selling console in the last year” is almost certainly referring only to the U.S. video games market.  Funny how he makes no mention of that.

The general message that Shaw is pushing out there with the blog is that Microsoft are going to be heavily promoting the home entertainment aspects of the Xbox 360, particularly when paired with Kinect, throughout this year’s E3.

Such a focus and reinvigorated sales drive from Microsoft may well lend added credence to the $100-off Xbox 360 and Kinect bundle that adverts were spotted for recently.  A welcome-to-Microsoft side effect of announcing that bundle may be that, should the NGP/Vita launch at the rumoured PS3-like price of $299 then Microsoft’s offering will look like spectacular value compared to what Sony is bringing to the table.

Not that the NGP is going to have an easy time of it regardless, unless Sony can achieve some kind of pricing miracle as in Japan survey respondents are citing the high price of Nintendo’s 3DS as the single biggest reason they have not yet bought one.  It is hard to believe the NGP will be any cheaper.

Back to the Microsoft blog in question though.  The broader home entertainment push is something that is, of course, likely to rankle somewhat with the more gaming-focused Xbox 360 owners.  An oft-mentioned complaint from Xbox 360 gamers of late has been the relative lack of disc-based exclusives.

In the blog Shaw states

The vision for Xbox is straightforward: All of the entertainment you want.

Turning that into some questions, we would like to ask those of you who are Xbox 360 owners, is it giving you all the entertainment you want?  Are you happy with the exclusive titles we know about?  Will you be happy if the Xbox 360 becomes more and more about home entertainment and less games-focused?