Dumb Xbox Questions

[MOlsen]

I have a number of dumb questions on the economics of consoles in general, and the Xbox in particular. In general, what percentage of sales are associated with the Christmas shopping season? Is it 10%, 25% or 50%? Anybody know? Does E3 give a boost to sales, depending on the showing of the company in question?

It appears that Xbox sales are begining to drop in North America,
according to this site (http://research.soundview.com/soundview/public/index.asp), and sales have not done as well as expected in either Europe or Japan. The Xbox sales are clearly driven by the North American market. We know that Xbox production (which is tightly linked to sales in the US) has been on the order of 100,000 for a while, but does anybody know the real number?

On the software side, how much do major retailers charge for stocking fees? I think I saw that Microsoft receives a cut from the sales of every third-party game, but how much? 10% or 30%, anybody know? And how much does it cost to make your average game? $5-7 Million US dollars, or is it more like $10-15 Million US dollars? Ports are clearly less expensive, if the original cost of developement is ignored, so more like $1-2 Million?

It has been widely reported that the software attachment is about 3.8 per Xbox in the US. Is this figure only at the time of sale of the console, or is it cumulative? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I was curious.

[l Maximus l]

Well, I know the answer of one of your questions: It takes a game developers approximately $5 Million to port an existing game.

[khaos2005]

About E3, yes, E3 does help out sales. Many people see all the great games that will come out on any given console, and depending on their tastes, some people go out and buy a console, because of the "E3 advertised" games that they are looking forward to. I think many excellent games will become official at E3 for the XBox, meaning that many people will also go out and buy the XBox.

Also, about the average games sold number, I *think* that is the games purchased when the system is bought. I read somewhere that the average number of games bought with the box is 4, so that seems about right. I cannot remember where I read this though.