Aaron Greenberg on NPD, Modern Warfare 2, and
Halo Reach

post from Destructoid on 11 December 2009 04:40:00 AM. © Destructoid

Aaron Greenberg on NPD, Modern Warfare 2, and Halo Reach screenshot

I had the pleasure of chatting with with Microsoft's Xbox man himself, Director of Product Management, Aaron Greenberg, over dinner last night. Well, we didn't quite have dinner together. I was eating pizza while talking on the phone with him. I hope I wasn't too rude.

Recession? Hardware sales down? Aaron Greenberg didn't sound worried when we talked about it. "People were surprised at how well Xbox 360 sold,"he told me. Despite headlines that say that Nintendo took it all in this busy holiday season, Greenberg pointed out more people spent money on Xbox 360 than anything else. Their figure of $838 million in "total consumer spending" beat out even Nintendo. And Sony, of course. That's 819,000 Xbox 360s in November, a bit under the Wii's 1.26 million, but about 100k more than PS3.

Having a lot of kickass games lined up surely helped a bit. The biggest, of course, is Modern Warfare 2. Gamers picked the Xbox 360 version over the PS3. "They picked the Xbox 360 version well over 2 to 1 over the PS3 version," Greenberg proudly boasted. You could hear the pride in his voice. The numbers show a total of 4.2 million copies sold for the Xbox 360, but Greenberg pointed to the Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundles, which he says weren't even counted in that number.

While talking about the just-released NPD sales numbers, I brought up all of the great games coming up in early 2010, and was sure to put in my complaint that I haven't even been able to purchase all the 4Q '09 ones yet. Greenberg sympathized, but warned that next year would be even harder on a blogger's pocketbook. "We have a blockbuster ever single month," Greenberg said, speaking of 2010. He pointed to games like Splinter Cell: Conviction, the new Crackdown, Alan Wake, and Mass Effect 2, reminding me that many of next year's titles are Xbox 360 exclusives.

I asked him what he thought the biggest would be for next year, and he wasted no time in blurting out the name of the next game in the Halo series, Halo Reach. Greenberg sounded very certain. "Halo Reach will be the best-selling game of 2010," he said. He couldn't tell me why yet, but I trust him.

"It's not all just Modern Warfare 2," Greenberg reminds. Plenty of other Xbox 360 games are helping out. Forza Motorsport 3 sold over a million copies worldwide last month. Greenberg added, "It's an important game for us, and it's actually the highest-rated next-gen racing title out there." Just as important were Xbox 360 exclusive games like Halo 3: ODST and Left 4 Dead 2, with the latter pulling in 744,000 copies in November. Greenberg noted that all of the great Black Friday and other holiday shopping deals didn't hurt.

Just for fun, I tried to give him shit about one game that I know did not do well for them: Tony Hawk: Ride. He was prepared: "I hadn't tried that yet." I nodded silently, smugly. Of course, he didn't see that. Then he asked, "have you played it yet?" I told him it was not good and that I was sure he had heard this before. He said something about a high price point. Then he slickly transitioned into other topics. I gotcha, buddy.

Thanks for chatting with us, Aaron.

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Xbox 360 still running ahead of PS3 in sales

post from Gaming Box on 11 December 2009 04:38:26 AM. © Gaming Box

Few days back Sony and Nintendo had announced their sales numbers for the month of November, while Microsoft was silent on their numbers and many believed that post launch of PS3 Slim, PS3 would have easily gained a lead in terms of sale this holiday season before Christmas, however the sales numbers show Xbox 360 [...]

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New Trailer for Army of Two: The 40th Day

post from Gaming Box on 11 December 2009 04:28:56 AM. © Gaming Box

This one is even better, features the game play footage, also the music to this game is composed by Tyler Bates, the man behind the score for 300 movie, read more on this here

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y/

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Transformers: War for Cybertron gets trailer

post from Destructoid on 11 December 2009 04:20:00 AM. © Destructoid

Transformers: War for Cybertron gets trailer screenshot

Transformers: War for Cybertron is coming to the Xbox 360 and PS3 soon, and GameTrailers has wangled itself the exclusive trailer. The game, developed by High Moon Studios, is set before the Transformers leave Cybertron and come to Earth -- this means that annoying human characters are nowhere to be seen, and all the robots transform into their cool Cybertronian vehicles.

High Moon doesn't have much of a history, but I choose to remain optimistic about this new game. It doesn't have the stench of Michael Bay clinging to it, and it can't be much worse than the last Transformers game to infect the market. We shall have to wait and see, of course, but the goal at least seems admirable so far. Hit the jump for the video.

Video Games | Transformers: War for Cybertron | Exclusive Debut Trailer HD XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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Army of Two: The 40th Day Cinematic trailer

post from Gaming Box on 11 December 2009 04:17:42 AM. © Gaming Box

This title is a sure on on my buying list

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Zynga Faces FarmVille Class-Action Lawsuit

post from Unigamesity on 11 December 2009 04:04:19 AM. © Unigamesity

A while ago, the internet was turned upside down after tons of disgruntled users started to call Zynga’s successful Facebook game FarmVille ?Scamville? because there were a few offers users could complete to get in-game currency, but just to find[...]

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Retro Round-up for December 11

by: Cyril Lachel
Article - It's a week full of ninjas and street fighters in this week's Retro Round-Up!

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READY TO FRIDAY

READY TO FRIDAY screenshot

Something weird is going on.

As you may or may not be aware, the Large Hadron Collider is now fully operational. That's great news for us science nerds, but ever since that bastard went online, all kinds of strange stuff has been happening. Trekkie chicks started getting kind of hot, I started work on a cartoon show, and this lightshow spiral phenomenon took place in the sky over Norway.

That sh*t's real. It happened. Nobody knows what it is, and for some reason, nobody's asking any questions. Maybe daily life in Norway is so exciting that people can look up and see a vortex with a spinny blue laser thing coming out of it and just roll over and go back to bed, but not here. We're curious. We want answers. Like what you kids are doing this weekend and whether anybody has that Vulcan girl's phone number.

FRIDAY.

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