Pizza Hut’s Xbox 360 app brings $1 million in orders in four months

Turns out, to the great shock of nobody, that pizza and gaming are indeed a perfect pair.

Restaurant chain Pizza Hut says that in the first four months of its ordering app being available on the Xbox 360, it received $1 million in orders.

In an interview with Polygon, Pizza Hut’s director of public relations Doug Terfehr called the app "a source of unbelievable growth" for the chain.

"Just the explosion of people who wanted to download it, experiment with it, play with it with Kinect," Terfehr said. "As soon as we did one, everyone was contacting us to do the next [one]."

Currently, the app is only available in the U.S. and for Xbox Live Gold members on the Xbox 360, but the company is looking to eventually expand into other markets, and onto other consoles. Right now, its focus is on improving its iOS and Android mobile ordering experiences, bringing them more in line with the Xbox version of the ordering interface.

[ Related: DVD rentals can now include ‘pizza smell’ on disc – are you hungry yet? ]

The Xbox 360 app lets customers build their pizza with the Xbox Kinect’s motion controls, voice commands or the game controller, then order directly from the console. It gives customers access to the full Pizza Hut menu and can be connected with Facebook, so all of your friends know that you just ordered a pizza on your Xbox 360.

Pizza Hut attended CES this week, showing up as one of several companies you wouldn’t typically think of as an exhibitor at a technology show. While major players like Apple and Microsoft have left CES in recent years, opting instead for standalone company events, companies from other industries that are looking to expand into the tech space have begun filling the booths instead.

"We’re getting a lot of attention," Caroline Masullo, Pizza Hut’s director of digital experiences, told the LA Times. "We have a lot of people coming up and saying, 'Really? Pizza Hut?'"

[ Full Coverage: Consumer Electronics Show 2014 ]

While Pizza Hut did briefly discuss its presence on the Xbox 360, the main reason for the company’s presence at this year’s CES was to mark 20 years since it received its first online order through its PizzaNet website. Today, Pizza Hut receives about 40 per cent of its orders online today, and about half of those are from mobile devices. No mention what percentage comes from the Xbox app.

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