Yeah, this is just getting painful to read now, so I'm going to sheathe my sword and walk away while he's still only making an ass of himself. I generally enjoy speaking with fanboys on this site, but usually they provide more entertaining discussion.
What's really harsh is how with so many games and systems Sony and MS have sold, they still can't seem to make any money. How is that possible? As for entertaining discussion, if you're not really interested don't comment. It's as simple as that.
The Xbox line has lost Microsoft money if you're looking at the whole life of the division, but what Microsoft really cares about is making a profit for the year, which they've been doing for a while now. I believe they've actually even made money on the 360 as a whole at this point after putting themselves in a bad spot with the red ring of death early in its life. They'll probably never make back the billions they spent on busting into the market, but they don't care.
MS isn't interested in making money at all. They're interested in stopping Sony from making inroads into the living room because that's what they're trying to do themselves. Kinect proved itself to be useless for gaming, but it's good as a user interface for the living room, apparently. Why the hell bundle something that's completely useless for gaming with your system and drive the cost up? Because they're not interested in gaming. Neither is Sony. If they happen to make any money off of games then that's just a side effect. They're both much more interested in controlling all of the media that you consume.
Whatever profits that MS has been making on the 360 recently are never going to make up for their losses from their first few years. Their losses from selling bellow cost added to what they lost from the lawsuit about the RRoD and the several billion dollars to fix that situation alone are going to take a while to dig out from under. Besides, there are no more hard numbers on their XBox division. They've buried it in a combined division so they can hide the losses. Apparently, the real numbers are closer to about $2 Billion lost each year, still.
Just like how Sony likes to hide their real hardware losses by selling components from their other divisions to their games division bellow cost so the numbers look better. Nobody ever really takes a good hard look at the books and everyone pretends that nothing's wrong. Par for the course.
As for MS not caring about all the money they lost on the original XBox, they should and so should you. Because of the huge losses that they've taking they've proven that they don't have a clue how to deal with video games. It's the same old story of throw money at it to make it better. Everyone's costs go up, developers go out of business and all of a sudden several million units sold, which used to be considered a smash hit, and a game still can't manage to break even let alone turn a profit. The entire situation becomes untenable and the industry as a whole begins to falter. Sony and MS don't care because they just want to push hardware that they can control into your living room on the backs of gamers. Everyone else can go bankrupt as long as they get what they want.
Yes, PS3 and 360 have been profitable for a while. Unless another RROD issue comes up, there is little reason to believe PS4 and XBO won't be profitable.
Gaug- Nintendo posted a 9/30 operating loss. Operating losses exclude currency adjustments. That means the Wii U wiped out all the 3DS and software development profits for the period. Ironically, Nintendo made a net profit for the period because of favorable currency adjustments. That info may be useful to you.
The original XBox didn't have any major hardware problems and MS still managed to lose around a billion dollars a year on it, that we know of anyway, and people say that is was a success. Neither did the PS3 and yet Sony still managed to wipe out every bit of money that they've ever made on games, and then some. You don't need a hardware disaster to lose money.
Nintendo isn't making money right now not just because of the Wii U but also because of the 3DS. It's selling great, yeah, but the hardware costs are still up there. That's one of the reasons the 2DS was released. They're really trying to get the costs down. I doubt they're making as much as you think on the 3DS even today. As the costs drop though, they'll make more. And the cost for the Wii U is dropping too. Shouldn't be too long before it becomes profitable as well.
Currency conversion is always an issue though. Especially when you're a smaller company like Nintendo who keeps all of their resources in one country under one currency, and liquid to boot. A small shift can easily wipe out your profit margins. Which makes it even more amazing that Nintendo has seen so few losses over the years.
Topic: Wii U is the new PS3? (Read 62807 times)
