Reading the Xbox System Update Tea Leaves

This week Microsoft released a very minor Xbox 360 dashboard update. They said that there were no new features and this was to help insure the future growth of the system and Xbox Live. Now this is intentionally vague but if you read the tea leaves a bit it might shed a light about their plans running into the fall and holiday 2008 video game shopping season.

I suspect that this most recent dash update might just add a list of new servers for first logging into the Xbox Live service. If you listen to E on the last episode of the Major Nelson podcast he said that his team at Xbox Live is getting ready to work their tails off an add servers and network infrastructure. Xbox Live does this when they expect they are going to have a big new number of sales of new Xbox hardware. They have occasionally done this around the launch of GTA IV size games to insure that the Xbox Live service does not get overwhelmed again like it did in December 07/ January 08.

There is the rumored price cuts expected to happen on September 7th. They are probably going to sell a lot of consoles for that. This update might be to get Xbox Live ready for the sales jump they expect when they lower the price of the Xbox with a 60 Gig Hard Drive to $299 and drop the cost of the Xbox 360 Arcade to $199.

Also the Jasper motherboard based Xbox 360s are due almost the same time. So the first week or so of September is going to be a very interesting time for Xbox.

Plus there is Madden 09, Fable 2 and RockBand 2 coming soon.

Via 8bitjoystick