DJEVOLVE said:
Xbox One, Just like PS3 will come back and sell very high, They already signaled they will drop price, meaning will well see a price cut in the Fall. Most likely $100 off. This will push numbers very high for XBox One. |
That sounds impressive only when you're just comparing to Sony's current pricing. A price drop by Sony for next holiday season is just as likely. And come on with the PS3 comparisons, really, XBone has no difficult to access performance advantage like PS3, if devs jump thru the ESRAM hoops they may not have memory bottlenecks, but that still leaves PS4 with 50% compute advantage (+ROPs, etc) for conventional graphics, GPGPU, etc.
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greenmedic88 said:
That would rely upon sales of the Wii U or the XB1 to completely stagnate, which within the first two years of release for a new console would signal the death nell of a platform (like the Dreamcast).
The only other way for this to happen is as Mummelmann previously stated, would be for SCE to sell more hardware units (20m) than they are currently capable of physically manufacturing.
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All it takes is for current sales trends to continue, nothing more, nothing less. Certainly that won't be PRECISELY accurae, but a good baseline to use. As far as reaching a 50% mark by the beginning of next holiday season, perhaps Sony's numbers will drop off some by summer, since their current numbers seem to reflect unmet launch demand, i.e. selling out of stock, and it's unclear how long that demand will persist, could be half a year, could be all year. For all the MS fan ragging on Sony's launch exclusives, Sony has more exclusives and more games period for 2014, and those will be keeping PS4's aura high all year.
greenmedic88 said:
It is unlikely that MS will take an additional $100 hit off their margins with a $399 MSRP in the hopes of chasing higher marketshare.
It's easy for platform fans to wish this, but a big part of the 8th gen when it came to the original design process, was to minimize losses per unit right out of the gate. I don't doubt that this played a role in convincing board members that the Xbox brand was well worth continued support and development.
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Exactly, correlation of MSRP to demand volume is obvious. If MS wanted to throw more $$$ at the XBOX pit, they would have done so by now.
Fanboys worry about which console 'wins', but larger marketshare at a loss is less attractive than smaller marketshare with some profitability to MS.
...The reductions in UK price so far have just been bringing it in line with global pricing, really, and notice the announced Titanfall bundle is targetted at UK specifically, as a critical market, not globally. (the point re: Live Gold 'bundling' is spot on)
Of course, process improvements can lead to lower manufacturing costs which can lead lower MSRP, but Sony does that too. Only point worth mentioning there is that Kinect2 should be less amenable to process improvements... changing optics would not be performance-equal so seems even less likely than unbundlin Kinect2 itself. Ditching it would allow MS to match or slightly beat Sony on price (if they are lucky), but would still be the weaker platform with weaker global demand. The global demand pattern is pretty simple, even if MS hadn't screwed up and were roughly equivalent, PS4 would still have sold more, even if not by alot. MS knows that like everybody else in the industry, and set their forecasts accordingly. Clearly, they did screw up, but betting more on a losing hand is just not a likely strategy for them, not when XBOX is marginal to MS as a whole. If their baseline potential demand is just less than Sony, then trying to play loss leader has that much less potential upside. I think they can be profitable with 1:2 sales vs. Sony, but not by trying to move mountains with loss leading tactics.
