Translated material
Xbox went on sale in Europe
Microsoft's Xbox Game Console on Thursday went on sale to European stores. Many stores selling computer games opened at midnight on Wednesday so that the most impatient buyers could get a new prefix as soon as possible, the Air Force notes.
In Europe, the prefix costs 479 euros, and Microsoft hopes that even at such a rather big price, the first one and a half million prefixes will be instantly sold out.
However, competitors are not asleep. The main competitor to Xbox, the prefix PlayStation 2 produced by the Japanese Sony, went on sale a year earlier and is considerable success. The 25 million PlayStation 2 has already been sold. Another competitor Xbox, GameCube, Nintendo, also entered the market last year. But Microsoft has to maintain the excitement around the Xbox and win the market.
The first to buy Xbox in the UK was a resident of Khitrovo Scott Roins. He defended in line for the long -awaited toy in the Virgin Megastore store in London for five hours. “I just went to see what kind of atmosphere here, and found that I was the first in line,” says Rolins.
The store owner of the store Richard Branson personally handed the prefix happy Rolin. The tycoon even gave his limousine to the first buyer so that he could take a precious acquisition home. However, Rolins was not awarded the greatest honor - to receive a prefix from the hands of Bill Gates personally, as happened with the first customers of Xbox in the USA and Japan.
At the end of February, the novelty entered the shelves of Japanese stores, and in the USA Xbox appeared on the market in November last year. In the United States back in 2001, about one and a half million prefixes were sold. But it has not yet been able to win Japan-the Xbox exit there was overshadowed by problems with the scratching of game CDs and DVDs, which many Japanese who bought Xbox began to complain about. As a result , Microsoft had to be called "before clarification", withdraw all the sold prefixes for free repairs .
Until now, the leadership in the prefix market holds Sony.