OldGaffer said:
Xbox didn't make any losses since the release of Xbox 360 Slim and Kinect. |
And we will never know just how the money flows inside the XBox (ad)venture.
One thing is VERY clear: MS loses a shitton of money on XBox1 hardware. And I don't mean they lose "a little" on every console, it is SHITTONS of money.
Consider the following: The PS4 recently saw a price hike by 10% in Europe. Probably the result of the ram deal that had to be renewed, at worse conditions as we all know ram prices are very high at this time. They upped the price of the base model from 299 to 329. They really do not want to lose money on hardware. Now consider this: there is a plethoria of XBox1 bundles in stores, ranging from $189 to $279 (each including three major games, and some have 3months of Live in addition to the games). There is _no way_ MS can produce those bundles at those prices and be profitable on the harware product, not even even marginally.
Now consider next: How much does XBox1 actually pay (yearly) for using, maintaining and expanding the Azure server farms Live feeds on? Have they ever paid anything or have they been free-riding on Azure services?
Now consider next: What happened to all those millions of (expensive, not cheap) Kinect2 chips and parts that were never put into Kinect2s? How much did that fiasco cost? Kinect2 is not cheap at all to manufacture. It is a brilliant technical gadget that (imo unnecessarily) died in its infancy. How do you value the many VR businesses that MS bought out during development of the XBox1 (which probably could also have been a preemptive strike against competitors)? What are all those VR people doing now which were supposed to do XBox1 VR stuff?
There are a lot of things we do not know and will never know as MS is absolutely silent on the details. There still is no clean "XBox division" for an answer (or a good guess), it has also always been padded with profitable "stuff".
