Alongside their Windows operating system, one of Microsoft’s most successful ventures has been into the game space: first with the Xbox and then with the ever popular Xbox 360. In today’s Trivia Tuesday, I’m going through some facts and pieces of trivia related to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.
Reminder: The Xbox 360 was first released on November 16, 2005 in North America, with other regions seeing launches in the months following. The updated Xbox 360 S was available from June 18, 2010.
66 million Xbox 360 units have been sold worldwide as of early 2012. This is backed up by 18 million sales of the Kinect motion controller peripheral.
$21 billion is the approximate revenue Microsoft has made from the Xbox 360 since launch on console hardware alone. This is based on an average console price of US$320 across the lifetime of the system.
887 games are available or upcoming for the Xbox 360 according to this Wikipedia list. Of the 887 games, 129 of them are exclusive to the Xbox 360; this means that 14.5% of all Xbox 360 games are exclusives. In comparison, the PS3 has only 746 games according to a similar list.
$35,480 would be the total amount of money spent had you bought every game for the Xbox 360 on launch for an average price of $40. If you lay all the games’ discs in a massive, single-file line, the line would be over 100 metres (330 feet) long.
Did you know that on launch the Xbox 360 console sold out in all Western regions? According to the BBC, some stores selling the console on launch were allocated less than 50 consoles, which contributed to a shortage of consoles and frustrated gamers.
The infamous 3/4-red-ring signature of the Red Ring of Death
23.7% of Xbox 360 consoles bought would fail due to a hardware error in the two years after purchase as reported by warranty provider SquareTrade. Their study was conducted between early 2007 and early 2009, and concluded that 12% of consoles failed from the infamous “Red Ring of Death” (RRoD) issue. In late 2008 a new “Jasper” motherboard Xbox 360 was silently released that significantly reduced the chance of getting a RRoD.
The Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360, designed by ATI/AMD, is capable of a reported 240 GFLOPS. This is equivalent to 2006’s ATI Radeon X1900 XTX high-end GPU and is currently equivalent to the AMD Radeon HD 6450. The current generation high-end AMD Radeon HD 7970 is approximately 15 times more powerful.
Did you know that the highest selling standalone game for the Xbox 360 is Call of Duty: Black Ops? Analysts peg the sales for the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops at 12 million copies, surpassing the next-highest seller Halo 3 which sold 8.1 million copies. The game that has technically sold the most copies is Kinect Adventures with 18 million, but this was bundled with the Kinect hardware pack.
360 grams is the difference in weight between the Xbox and the (lighter) Xbox 360; the former weighing 3.86 kg (8.5 lb) and the latter 3.5 kg (7.7 lb). The Xbox 360 S comes in at 2.85 kg (6.3 lb), and so weighs 650 grams less than the Xbox 360 and 1 kg less than the Xbox original.
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Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Activision
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