MS bothers because they cannot allow Sony to dominate the gaming industry while having a non windows OS. They tried to partner with them and Sony turned them down so they tried to take them out. The Xbox was created with good intentions., but the higher ups wouldnt back it until it was used as tool to stop Sony.

There are simply too many variables in play, most of which we have no access to. Yes we know the Xbox One bundle was sold at $329 with the two latest AC games. The question here is how much did Microsoft pay Ubisoft, people need to remember that when you buy from someone in bulk the price is much lower. You think Gamestop pays Ubisoft $60 for AC Unity then sells it back to people for $60? No they buy in bulk for a lower price and sell at a higher price for profit, that's business 101.

We also have no idea how many games/accessories/live subscriptions were purchased over the week of Black Friday. We did get a statement out of them but PR can be misleading, sure maybe they sold more games this November than any month before but was it enough to help cut the losses down to something reasonable? We don't know.

And of course you have all the money they probably spent on advertising over the month of November which once again are details we have no access to. The price of manufacturing the console is supposedly smaller than it was at launch, if that's true that is another variable at play.

For all we know, Microsoft really did lose around $60m in November but that will more than likely be made back by the new year, if it hasn't already been done. And of course, there is a chance that they projected to sell a lot more consoles and they actually lost 100m+ but there simply isn't anyway for us to know and so arguing about it isn't gonna get us anywhere.

Yes, but look for the string "corporate-level" and the balance item "Corporate and Other" in MS balance sheets: it's a balance item separated from every division and purely at loss, that includes a lot of costs, losses, legal expenses, the cost of every R&D that can be used by more than one divison, etc. and makes the least profiting or even losing divisions look better than they are. Gaming division eventually turns to profit during a gen and the situation almost always betters from an usually awful start (except for the first XB, plagued by a horrible deal with NVidia and Intel for GPU and CPU preventing it from ever stopping losing a lot on HW), but that corporate-level stuff allowed MS to hide at a first glance for years how much Win Mobile/Phone and Win CE were losing

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar14/index.html

Not really IMO, but so do a lot of things people discuss here not really matter all that much to the consumer.

Right so this is just used a bullet for Sony fans to downplay MS success seems silly to me.

What people fail to understand is that for say AC:Unity retail release the amount may be $40 to the publisher. For a packin like what is occurring with AC:Unity and AC:Black Flag the publisher is going to accept far less.  MS goes to Ubisoft and says research says that you will sell say 1 million copies of AC:Unity and another 100K units of Black Flag this year.  How about we bundle them both in with the X1 from November through December and we will pay you the full publisher amount for every single one of the consoles sold and in exchange for that we also get to package in Black Flag.  Ubisoft is going to jump at a deal like that.  No one would suggest that Ubisoft expected an attach rate of 1 AC:Unity for every 1 X1 sold, and thats what they basically end up with.

MS winning NPD in Nov was an easy win. All they needed to do was make the decision to lower the price. And they did....

The more amazing win is the PS4 selling crazy during typically slow months of Jan to Sept. With no price cut, no system seller games, and saying FU to the next COD, Titanfall. And all of this happening in a country that normally goes MS.

Plus they were forced to drop Kinect, and that was never suppose to happen....

Not much of a win if you ask me.

Peanuts to MS, which is why they're still losing the console wars.