According to this BBC article, Microsoft announced the European launch date of the Xbox on Tuesday at a gala unveiling in Cannes, France at the home of designer Pierre Cardin.
The console will debut at a cost of £299 ($433). In comparison, Sony just lowered the price of the PlayStation 2 to to £199 ($288).
Microsoft is keen to avoid the problems Sony suffered with PS2 availability last year:
CoreMagazine.com has posted an interview with Microsoft games division vice president Ed Fries, responsible for the Xbox, and Yutaka Haruki, Japanese Xbox division manager. There are a few notes about the reduction in hard drive size, and the reduction of the Xbox's controller size (in Japan), but Halo also gets a mention when they asked Fries about the Xbox in the Japanese market:
According to a story at cube.ign.com, Toys R Us, which sells online through Amazon.com, says they have sold out of Nintendo GameCube preorders-- and that it did so eight times faster than with the Xbox. They aren't releasing preorder numbers for either console, however.
Ok, bear with us while we follow the breadcrumbs on this one.
According to Microsoft's PR material, the console gaming market is approximately three times as large as the PC gaming market (about 30M compared to 10M). In addition, about 7M of PC gamers also own a console machine.
Therefore, the opportunity to develop for a console platform offers a much larger customer base, in addition to simplifying development by assuring that all users' machines will be exactly the same, limiting compatibility problems.
The Xbox will be Microsoft's first foray into the console gaming market. It will be based around an Intel Pentium III processor with a custom set of graphics chips produced by nVidia, a slimmed-down version of Windows 2000, and 64MB of main memory shared with the graphics processors. It will have HDTV output capabilities and an ethernet port. More information is available at xbox.ign.com and planetxbox.com
The first version of Halo will be released for the Xbox game console by Microsoft. It is expected to debut in North America on November 15, 2001.
The Xbox hardware consists of a 733 Mhz Intel processor, a custom Nvidida graphics processor based on the GeForce 3, and 64MB of DDR RAM which is used by both the CPU and GPU.
FiringSquad, the gaming site started by Dennis Thresh Fong of Quake fame, has put together a daunting article examining the Xbox's hardware, comparing it not only to the PC architecture it owes its origins to, but also to that of the consoles it will compete against, the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube.There are far too many detailed points to mention them all here.
Chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach has told PlanetXbox that his console is the one worth waiting for.
He better hope he's right.
As posted by Rauko in our forum, the release of Microsoft's console is being delayed a week. The new release date is November 15, 2001.
Despite recent assurances from Microsoft reps to the contrary, Wired News has an article up today speculating that unless you buy one of those bundles now, you may be shut out of getting an XBox this holiday season.
