When will Wii surpass 360 (if ever)?

[reverie]

Viper said: reverie said:What I do think is weird that while everybody who thinks he's in the know can tell you in general that software is where Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft make their moneyWhile largely true for Sony and MS, this it's not as accurate for Nintendo. Historically, Nintendo has always sold hardware for profit. The GC was the first exception as they took an initial $9.00 loss on hardware for the first year. Profit was made from that point on. With the DS and Wii, profit is rather sizable from the onset.

That's not quite true. What you are referring to is the fact that Nintendo (according to their statements in recent years) does not sell hardware below manufacturing cost. But they still have R&D cost for each new system up front, be it $0.5 Bio, $1.0 Bio or even $2.0 Bio. They could never recoup this investment without software revenues. And those $9 on the DS you mentioned are speculation, or did you get them from Nintendo's financial report? There is no other way to find out the real numbers unless you become an executive at Nintendo. Just forget analyst's predictions. They have been proven wrong time and again. Analysts are analysts for their big mouth and their inability to get a real job in the industry.

Sony is taking the largest loss per console ever for any console right now but expect to make profit in 2-3 years time (I don't agree with them on that though).

Where did Sony state that? All they said is that it's an expensive system to manufacture and that they are trying to reduce cost (something everybody does) without necessarily dropping the price anytime soon. No numbers or historic relations or future announcements have been made available.

MS never made hardware profit on Xbox but has stated they now make profit on X360 hardware. I don't know how accurate that is but it can't be much nor will it erase the debt they've established anytime soon.

Sorry, this is pure speculation. Microsoft said that they want to stop losing more money with the XBox project in 2008 (they will hit $6 Bio in total net losses this year). This includes consoles and software sales. They did not say anything about manufacturing cost for the console, neither for the old system nor for the new system. It has been speculated that the 360 might be cheaper to manufacture and cost-cut over its lifetime then the original XBox because the original XBox had very little custom chips, rather looking like a bland Windows PC inside. However for the same reason (customization) the R&D was probably much higher for the 360 than for the XBox. Again, there are no numbers on manufacturing cost from any of the 3 players now. If you want to see a console that wasn't developed as a loss leader look at the 3DO.