Robbie Bach, SVP of Microsoft's games division, said yesterday the company plans to spend a cool half-billion dollars on marketing its Xbox in the first 18 months of its debut, making it the biggest product launch ever for Microsoft. The plan at this point appears aimed primarily at unseating the prominence of Playstation 2, which will have been on the market about a year before Xbox launches in fall 2001, and staving off any threat from Nintendo's next-generation console, which is expected to arrive in the U.S. at around the same time as Xbox. Bach's presentation to a meeting of financial analysts was focused mainly on comparisons between Xbox and Playstation 2 specifications and development environments, leading some analysts to believe that Sony is the only competition Microsoft is taking seriously. However, much less is known at this stage about Nintendo's upcoming console than Playstation 2, which has already been released in Japan.
Bach also said that the Xbox hardware design has been completed. "We are now building the form factors, the forms to actually put components in. We are now at the stage where we're making serious progress bringing Xbox to life," he said. Currently approximately 30 games are known to be under development for release at or near the console launch. Bach said development kits would be on their way to about 200 third-party developers.
