MS Plans More 360s Onto Shelves

Microsoft's third manufacturing giant Celestica joins two existing makers to ramp up Xbox production.

The big problem for many avid gamers this Christmas was: I want an Xbox 360, but where do I find one? While Microsoft has been frustratingly quiet on the issue, other than acknowledging it exists, the company has now stepped forward with a potential solution.

Make more! Make more of them right NOW!

Speaking at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft's Peter Moore said the company would try to boost the number of Xbox 360s being produced by bringing in a third production partner.

"We need to meet the consumer demand worldwide and having this ability now to do that with three manufacturing partners helps us do that," said Moore. In an internal email from Peter Moore to the whole of the Xbox team, shown to Kikizo, Moore elaborated, "early next month Celestica will join Wistron and Flextronics to start producing Xbox 360 consoles, so we can meet this incredible demand," he said referring to three manufacturing powerhouses announced last year - only two of which have so far been on the Xbox 360 assembly line.

Microsoft said last year that it was hoping to sell 3 million Xbox 360s in the first 90 days and the latest estimates from Microsoft have the console hitting around 4.5 to 5 million by the end of June. Whether that will be enough to stave off the juggernaut that is the PlayStation 3 is anybody's guess.

There was other good news from Moore too. He confirmed that Xbox Live uptake is already massively over what it was with the original Xbox. Already 50 per cent of all Xbox 360s sold are connected to Xbox Live as opposed to around 10 per cent in the previous generation.

The numbers are, however, less impressive without a breakdown of how many subscribers there are to Microsoft's pay-service Xbox Live Gold. The current number includes all those using the free Xbox Live Silver service.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games