Malstrom: Microsoft has lost control of the NATAL hype

[KungKras]

disolitude said:

KungKras said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:

Sony's "make money on software not hardware" philosophy has gotten out of control and almost killed Sony and Microsoft's game divisions as well.

The PS1 did what the SNES did, but was bigger and better. The only new interesting things the PS1 did were "fill whole CD's with FMVs" and "treat 3rd parties better than Nintendo does, and they will give you more support."

Also, selling hardware at a loss was nothing new. Sega selling the megadrive at a loss whas the reason that it could compete with the Super Nintendo.

No one has been able to prove this. Do you have an article stating this?

Its a fact that genesis is less powerfull and was made 2 years before the SNES. Yet it was always around the same price range, if maybe 50 dollars cheper. So it should have been cheaper to make...

Combined with the fact that Sega CD was sold at 299 (for a profit) and 32X was sold for 149 (for a profit) and Sega Saturn was sold for 399 (for a profit UNTIL sony cut the price on them to 299 and then cut it agian to 199 a year later.

And Dreamcast was launched at 199 in NA which was at cost...which was the main reason Bernie Stolar was fired by Sega of Japan. They wanted it sold for 249 and a profit.

I think its safe to say that Genesis was sold at cost if not a slight profit no?

I don't think I can come up with a reliable source, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the megadrive was around $190 until Tom Kalinske got hired in 1990 and cut the price od the console. From what I know, Tom Kalinske was a believer in the razor and blades model.

   I am very curious as to how you know that Bernie Stolar was fired just because he wanted the DC to launch cheap. I thought that they fired him after the dreamcast launch because launches was all he did well. He made the Playstation launch big, but tried to prevent square from making Final Fantasy VII for the playstation and thus got fired. Sega hired him and he proceeded to fuck up the Saturn with his no-RPG-no-2D policies. Sega knew he would fuck up the Dreamcast and just let him do the launch well and then fired him. That's how I understand it anyway.

As for the Mega CD and the 32X, maybe Sega just considered them peripherals to make up the money lost by the megadrive on, just like selling controllers or memory cards at a profit.

About the playstation and Saturn, you forget that the playstaytion and the Saturn were both differently expensive to manufacture. Saturn was a monster when it came to components, and therefore much much more expensive then the playstation to manufacture. Playstation had a simpler design and thus Sony didn't suffer as much as Sega did from price cuts. Saturn was expensive to manufacture through it's entire lifespan, and playstation manufacture costs got cheaper.