Aaron Greenberg on NPD, Modern Warfare 2, and Halo Reach

I had the pleasure of chatting with with Microsoft’s Xbox man himself, Director of Product Management, Aaron Greenberg, over dinner last night. Well, we didn’t quite have dinner together. I was eating pizza while talking on the phone with him. I hope I wasn’t too rude.

Recession? Hardware sales down? Aaron Greenberg didn’t sound worried when we talked about it. “People were surprised at how well Xbox 360 sold,” he told me. Despite headlines that say that Nintendo took it all in this busy holiday season, Greenberg pointed out more people spent money on Xbox 360 than anything else. Their figure of $838 million in “total consumer spending” beat out even Nintendo. And Sony, of course. That’s 819,000 Xbox 360s in November, a bit under the Wii’s 1.26 million, but about 100k more than PS3.

Having a lot of kick ass games lined up surely helped a bit. The biggest, of course, is Modern Warfare 2. Gamers picked the Xbox 360 version over the PS3. “They picked the Xbox 360 version well over 2 to 1 over the PS3 version,” Greenberg proudly boasted. You could hear the pride in his voice. The numbers show a total of 4.2 million copies sold for the Xbox 360, but Greenberg pointed to the Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundles, which he says weren’t even counted in that number.

While talking about the just-released NPD sales numbers, I brought up all of the great games coming up in early 2010, and was sure to put in my complaint that I haven’t even been able to purchase all the 4Q ’09 ones yet. Greenberg sympathized, but warned that next year would be even harder on a blogger’s pocketbook. “We have a blockbuster ever single month,” Greenberg said, speaking of 2010. He pointed to games like Splinter Cell: Conviction, the new Crackdown, Alan Wake, and Mass Effect 2, reminding me that many of next year’s titles are Xbox 360 exclusives.

I asked him what he thought the biggest would be for next year, and he wasted no time in blurting out the name of the next game in the Halo series, Halo Reach. Greenberg sounded very certain. “Halo Reach will be the best-selling game of 2010,” he said. He couldn’t tell me why yet, but I trust him.

“It’s not all just Modern Warfare 2,” Greenberg reminds. Plenty of other Xbox 360 games are helping out. Forza Motorsport 3 sold over a million copies worldwide last month. Greenberg added, “It’s an important game for us, and it’s actually the highest-rated next-gen racing title out there.” Just as important were Xbox 360 exclusive games like Halo 3: ODST and Left 4 Dead 2, with the latter pulling in 744,000 copies in November. Greenberg noted that all of the great Black Friday and other holiday shopping deals didn’t hurt.

Just for fun, I tried to give him shit about one game that I know did not do well for them: Tony Hawk: Ride. He was prepared: “I hadn’t tried that yet.” I nodded silently, smugly. Of course, he didn’t see that. Then he asked, “have you played it yet?” I told him it was not good and that I was sure he had heard this before. He said something about a high price point. Then he slickly transitioned into other topics. I gotcha, buddy.

Thanks for chatting with us, Aaron.