Would it be possible to add net profit data for the hardware manufacturers to the data? In the cases of Microsoft and Sony I would expect profits from the company as a whole, then a comparison to what profit came via game software/hardware/online services. For Nintendo, Sega, Atari I would expect simply profit or losses from game and hardware sales. In Nintendo's case, however, it might be necessary to adjust for a couple other significant items (i.e. the sale of Rare, owning part of the Seattle Mariners baseball franchise, profit from the Pokemon shows and movies etc.) Obviously, Atari and Sega would only be counted for their main consoles and when they made hardware. A.k.a... Nintendo - profits from 1980- 2007 (Game and Watch to Wii) Atari - profits in the 70s- 84 (the great crash) Sega - profits from 86'-01' (Master System to DreamCast) Sony - profits from 1995 (in the US) - 2007 (PS1- PS3) Microsoft - profits from 01' to 07' (Xbox and the 360) With this data, it would be possible to see which business models work the best historically, by comparing hardware and software sales to the size of the user base...statistical correlations or advanced graphs could then be made to project whether a manufacturer is having the kind of sucess it needs to do better than before.

Good lord that is a lot to ask for! Are you a business major looking to pawn off your homework by any chance?

Not at all. But since profit data is public for investors, I figure it can at least be as reliable as hardware and software data...but yeah it is alot to ask for...it would be crunching dozens of years of data,

Wow, you are asking for a lot of work to track down all the profit numbers. Why not do it yourself and you can post it on this site.