Microsoft not ready to talk new hardware

The Xbox 360 sold a quarterly record of 2.7 million units between 1st January and 31st March this year, Microsoft has announced, up from 1.5 million over the same period last year.

The data came from Microsoft's fiscal Q3 financial report released today, which stated that total Xbox 360 platform revenue grew year-on-year by $712 million (or 69 per cent) to $1.95 billion.

Company-wide, revenue was up 13 per cent to $16.43 billion.

Driving the platform's growth, the Kinect peripheral sold 2.4 million units in the quarter, putting life-to-date sales at around 10.4 million units when taking into account the eight million it sold between its 4th November launch and 31st December 2010.

"Consumers are delighted with Kinect, as well as our entire Xbox 360 platform, for the revolutionary experience it brings to their living room," commented chief financial officer Peter Klein during an investor call. "Kinect continues to lead the way forward in gaming."

With hardware sales clearly on an upswing, Microsoft insisted that it wasn't ready to start discussing the Xbox 360's successor.

"We're really not talking about that," said investor relations boss Bill Koefoed, in response to a question as to when new hardware might be forthcoming.

"Right now we're incredibly excited about what's going on with Xbox 360 and certainly Kinect, which is relatively new to the market, so we're focussed on that."

As reported earlier this week, Nintendo plans to unveil its next home console at E3 this year.