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thismeintiel said:
LudicrousSpeed said:
The business is about revenue and profit. Selling more consoles certainly helps that, but it isn’t the only factor. Nintendo made a lot of money selling much less console amounts during the N64-GCN era.

You’re going to see all three companies go all in on subscriptions and recurring revenue. It’s the future, just like it has become in pretty much every other entertainment avenue. It will become less and less about selling the boxes.

Those profits came from Nintendo selling tens of millions of handheld HW, which led to tens of millions of SW sold from that HW. It definitely didn't come from underperforming home consoles.

And yes, digital subs and sales are important, but it is the combination of both that and physical retail that makes one very successful. And more boxes sold means more profit from HW and higher potential for sales of physical and digital goods.

Nintendo profited with less hardware by controlling the prices of their software. You can already buy Detroit and God of War for less than $20 pretty routinely. Never happened with Nintendo back in the day or even modern Nintendo. Sony came into the industry with a loss-leading mentality and Nintendo never really followed. PS3 eventually sold what, close to 90 million or something? Yet Sony lost billions on it at one point and maybe still ended up losing overall, idk.

Yeah, you sell more consoles, you can sell more games. He doesn't say console sales have zero importance. He's talking about a customer already in the Xbox ecosystem, and how MS doesn't need to sell them an S or an X if they're still buying games and subscribing to Gamepass on their launch Xbone. And of course, he's right. And they obviously understand they need to improve their appeal to other gamers in order to grow that install base, otherwise they wouldn't have just bought a shit ton of studios.

The big question is, post-E3, have you made your annual "if __ fails, MS is out of the industry!!" prediction yet? What is it this time? If Elite 2 fails? If Battletoads fails? Please let us know.