disolitude said:
KungKras said:
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."
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Bernie stollar firing summary.
http://info.sonicretro.org/Bernie_Stolar
I think sega was using a lot of bundled games as razorblades in the razor and blades model. I remember sonic 1 bundle, sonic 1 and 2 bundle...but I had to save up my money to buy a snes or a genesis in 1992 and the were both similarly priced. Later in the lifecycle of the console they may have been 50 dollars cheaper until 1996 when the genesis was discontinued and fire sale was on.
I agree that Saturn was a beast cost wise. They used brand name parts and quality was top notch. My saturn still works and never misses a beat...see howmny PS1s work from 1996 :) PS2 was a better example of sony cutting price to eliminate competition. Just look at the losses sony had the year PS2 launched. You have the number 1 and number 2 platform (PS1 and PS2) and you lose 510 million dollars?
http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=72524&page=1
All in all, I dont think sega needed to sell hardware at a loss until PS1. Nintendo wasn't going to do it, 3DO wasn't going to do it and rest didn't matter. So this method was a disruption on how business was done...and Sony gets the credit for starting it. (or blame depending how you look at it)
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I see, so that's why they fired Stolar. They should have gotten rid of him the first time he even mentioned his "policies".
Anyway, I still believe that Sega at some point was losing money on their hardware, but you may be right in that Sony popularized it.
