![]() This lasted until near the end of the console's life, when Microsoft finally started the user's country's regular currency. Online purchases were priced in "Microsoft Points," which allowed users to make purchases without a credit or debit card while reducing the credit card transaction fees Microsoft would otherwise have to pay should one be used. The 360's business model in general relied on selling consoles at a loss (although, unlike the original Xbox, the 360 console has turned the corner into profitability) while making money on accessories, Xbox Live Gold subscriptions and DLC. The lead would narrow as Microsoft would stop dropping prices in favor of upgrading hard drive sizes and bundling additional software and features. The only exception was Japan, where its more modest sales are blamed on a lack of exclusive content aimed at Japanese gamers. Microsoft was beating Sony so badly in the Console Wars early on that, for a while, their primary competition came from Nintendo's unexpectedly successful Wii.īy the end of 2008, the Xbox 360 was in second place behind the Wii and still comfortably in the lead over the PS3 in most regions. As a result, the 360 began getting more exclusive titles as well as securing many of the third-party franchises that were once glued to PlayStation consoles. The PlayStation 3 had an infamously bad start due to its high price tag, it came out a full year after the 360, and it was harder to develop games for due to its complex and unorthodox hardware architecture. Unlike the original Xbox, the 360 initially outsold its Sony rival. ![]() This was greatly aided by Microsoft's developer tools said tools have been praised by, among others, John Carmack of id Software as the best development environment he's ever seen on a console, which helped mitigate the change from the x86 CPU architecture, the same used in PCs, to PowerPC. ![]() Though its hardware was not PC-based like its predecessor note While the original Xbox was indeed a powerful console, its design consisting largely of off-the-shelf PC components was expensive to produce, and thus Microsoft decided it needed to go with a more customized design with the 360 in order to be more cost-efficient, the software continued to be DirectX-based, thus it was still relatively easy to port games from the PC platform. The 360 featured a new version of the Xbox Live service with improvements over the original. a year ahead of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. Down but not deterred, Microsoft came back in 2005 with the Xbox 360 note Again, that's all one word - no hyphen, no CamelCase. While it did decently and even managed to outsell the Nintendo GameCube, it only sold well in North America, didn't actually make Microsoft any money, and still got destroyed by the PlayStation 2 by a good 131 million units. In 2001, Microsoft threw their hat into the console race with the Xbox.
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