A typically bad mainstream press article about gaming again ...

C|Net's News.com is saying that analysts estimate Microsoft to lose at least a billion dollars before managing to break even on X-Box, something that won't happen until 2004.

However, the numbers in the article are rough, and contradictory. No analyst agrees on the cost of the box, so the numbers are ROUGH estimates (suggesting even a loss of TWO billion later in the same article).

The article closes with "Game companies typically sell hardware at loss for the first few years to spur sales, relying on income from software sales and licensing to subsidize hardware costs." Of course, until GameCube, Nintendo never lost money on its consoles, and losses on the GameCube hardware will be far less than the losses Sony and Microsoft are taking on their systems.