This isn't a scientific study. It's not even based much upon sales figures and not at all on those self-serving surveys. So this is rather mostly a non-empirical, rule of thumb off the cuff sort of story, with anecdote and "common sense" perhaps. These aren't necessarily in order either; although the first one is the most important.
1. There are a number of recent things that have certainly or likely broadened the appeal of the Xbox 360 to large extent, but primarily it's a gaming device. So people buy it to play games upon it. The number of people who have a 360 is the biggest reason people buy more, which feeds on itself. But games is the main reason to get one
What sort of games we ask? Well there's a lot of them, but if the big sellers are the main reason, it's for those sorts of games then. Sort of a QED, sort of a tautology. To dip though into some random reports of dubious veracity then. The top 10 best sellers of 2011 say, that starts with what's to large extent First Person shooters. Ones with numbers in the titles, as really all of them are. Three being the most prevalent, trivially speaking.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Battlefield 3
In the case of what's affectionately known as Skyrim, it's a first or third person fantasy role playing game, but you do shoot things; magically, shoutingly and with bows. It's also (for the voice commands) "Kinect enabled". Which brings us to the rest of the list, being as the next two are actual Kinect titles.
Kinect Sports Season 2
Just Dance 3
Followed out by mostly more shooters, first person and otherwise.
Halo 3 (Allegedly)
Gears of War 3
Saint's Row The Third (we see what you did there)
Fifa 12 (our only sports sim)
Batman: Arkham City (technically, more like "Batman Arkham 2", but who's counting)
2. That leads us to
Kinect. Figure and voice recognition, sports, edutainment, exercise, video chat and conferencing, game and AV control, and so on. Kinect certainly hasn't hurt console sales. Although it is as much a cool factor, a kids draw (think, interactive Sesame Street) and a user interface as it is anything else. But only the Xbox 360 has it (aside from some hackers here and there, as they say) and it's a reason to get a 360.
3. Multiplayer. Part of the recent surge in console sales is weight; the more people playing multiplayer on a platform, the more reason there is for others to join in. (It's also a big part of why the Call of Duty franchise is so big.)
3. Another part to that, perhaps the same thing, maybe another subject. The multiplayer aspect goes along with the chat and party features of the 360, and the other way around. Those are reasons to get a 360 versus one of the alternatives, a different console or a computer. It's fairly seamless and easy to "chat and party" as long as your friends (or new ones) are along for the ride.
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For both of those, yes, it requires a "gold membership" of Live to use, but that's also needed to use IE , and so do many of the music/video/news/streaming features. But at discount that "Gold Live" is $40 a year or so, you get a network (speed, stability, uptime) that goes along with the price, and there are enough deals and freebies over a year where it ends up costing little or nothing in absolute terms.
This aspect of paying for access is also a reason people don't buy a 360, but we're not talking about that here right now.
4. Apps and such. The addition of Internet Explorer (slow and HTML5 video/audio only really) might not mean much, unless you've got a keyboard and mouse and don't mind waiting and having no flash etc. IE also replaced the Twitter and Facebook apps, which are also not much to speak of either. But the addition of things like Netflix, Vudu, MLB, UFC, ESPN, even though most are just front-ends to services you already have to have from the respective providers. There are also free (to some extent, pay for premium, watch and listen to advertising, etc) audio and video streaming apps though, Crackle, Last and so on. Along with Xbox Video and Xbox Music (which used to be called Zune) for those who want to digitally rent or buy (regardless of cost, because of ease). And a few more things. Overall then, this in its entirety makes it a reason to buy, or at the least adds to the reason. Of course, the 360 is also a DVD player, but even with a specific "regular" remote, that's not much of a reason to buy a 360 in and of itself. Some $200 or $300 for a clunky big limited DVD player, not so much of a draw. There are other pros and cons too......
However taken in total, all of these coordinated entertainment viewing options, plus and minus, offer a number of people a reason to consolidate things on one platform.
5. Integration with other things that are all windowy-like. Although for some, this item here is a reason to get the other things rather than a reason to get a 360. But with the rolling in of similar interfaces and cross-platform logins and user data and other things, there's Windows 8 (the OS) and Windows Phone (7 and 7.5 and 8). Throw in a tablet here, a laptop there, roll it back into the infrastructure, and as the French say, boom.
6. Sound and visual schemes. They've taken the wussiest and most wretched looks and sounds from the Wii say for example, and made everything look and sound like those sorts of things. It likely brings over some fair number of buyers (or pushes them in), while the gamers just turn off the sounds (except for some apps that think it's fun to play the sounds too) and don't pay much attention to the colors. Well, actually, the gamers are probably too busy actually playing games to worry about how things pander to the sorts of people that buy those other things. All in all, it's probably a net-sum gain, one might guess.
7. Microsoft points MSP. A convenient way to consolidate funds to get games on demand (overpriced usually, and with no physical media ever, but something that appeals so some people), Downloadable content DLC (addins for games, songs and dances for such games, etc), share funds in a family. Plus some of the other things (Xbox Rewards, Bing Search) let consumers get MSP for doing other things.
8. Achievements. A big part of the total, a meaningless number of great import. It gives goals, reasons, something to count. How many of the total (1000, 200, whatever) did you get out of the game? Did you fully complete it, do you have a reason to replay it. Not that it's needed, people play CoD multiplayer even without it, others don't care. On the other hand, there are whole web sites just for them, such as this one and this one.
9. Hardware and software lock in. If you game on the PC, and you play the newest games, and you want all the graphics and speed the games have to offer, you are going to be spending a lot of money frequently. Say you've got a PC that's 2 years old and has a graphics card that cost $150 at the time. What games are you going to play now that are new and this gen? How about 5 or 7 years old. Plus the whole PC support thing. Do PC break and need to be replaced as much as the older Xbox that red ringed do? Probably not, but the out-of-date PC will have to be upgraded or replaced.
The side benefit is greater graphic resolution and such possible on a PC, for those who spend $500 not really, and how many people buy $1000 or $3000 PC every year or two. Maybe that's overstating things and making it seem a bigger deal than it is. But much has been done on a hardware platform that has stayed stable and has requirements. The software is optimized in ways it can't be on a wide variety of uncontrolled hardware. Even more so, hardware that changes from month to month. (Check the stats of a $350 video card from five years ago versus one from right now for example. Which may we remind you please, is about the cost of a console with hard drive and a year of Live Gold.)
Which that uncontrolled/controlled thing is the second part. Cheaters, hackers, viruses, spyware on a console. That goes for any console, but remember this is also a paid network. How much, if anything, they actually spend on the network is another question, but there's no doubt they have teams watching for those people who abuse or take advantage of the system. Maybe some don't like that control, or who's doing it, but most console buyers probably don't, regardless of what they think of Microsoft Or Microsoft versus Sony versus Nintendo, for that matter. Or even Valve and Steam on the other side of things. Punkbuster, sure. Xfire, of course. And nothing here is meant to suggest PC gaming is worse or better, or that it isn't much bigger or much smaller overall just that these are factors. It's also not meant to suggest the superiority of the mouse/keyboard (for most games) is in question. :smiley:
10. I'm sure there's a ten here somewhere, maybe later.
So there you have it. The main reasons that people buy Xbox 360s, which primarily is for gaming purposes. Or at least that's probably where all the money is. Some 12% of sales of all games is almost certainly a bigger chunk than the number of people using the cable apps to watch cable TV on an Xbox 360 or how many people are browsing the web with a controller in a single-use full-screen program on a console.
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