| Seraphic_Sixaxis said: Nice read Squil, very logical. "That is my Answer" |
Thanks, I tried to present a good case.
As far as power use reduction goes every single die shrink will net the console in total a lower level of power consumption. There was a graph floating around for the Cells power consumption @ 90, 65, and 45nm and the same applies to the Xenon as its a similar architecture.
The thing with the Xbox 360s sales is that if you take its performance during the holidays as a baseline it would appear to overperform when compared to the rest of the year and the only way to reconcile that is to consider the holiday shopping period to be a different purchasing pattern. This pattern has higher relative sales in the Americas relative to Others and Japan compared to normal non holiday pattern and higher relative sales of the Xbox 360 Arcade which indicates that people are either more price concious or they are buying the cheapest console as a gift.
During the year the average sale price in America for example is much closer between the Xbox 360 and PS3 and its likely a more 'core' group of purchasers buying consoles. For this group the relative price is the same or identical for the most part as the average price is something like $270 or so with aproximately as many PS3s being sold @ $399 as Premium and Elite consoles being sold for $299/$399. A closer relative price will of course give the PS3 an advantage during this pattern of sales.
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| makingmusic476 said: I still don't think the 360 will get a much of a price cut this year. The base price for the console won't dip below $179, if it ever gets lower than $199 (this year, I mean). I don't think their focus at the moment is to increase sales of the 360 as is. I think their focus is to simply keep the momentum they have going until Natal is ready and they can try and shake up the market. |
The sales are only up until they hit the holidays and then we face the music and find out how much demand has been sustained or lost in 12 months since a price cut. The important price point for the holidays is the Xbox 360 Arcade because that makes up the bulk of sales, but it doesn't really have direct competition from the PS3 at this point. They may only cut that price more than $0-$20 if they are swinging for the fences in terms of overall bulk of sales. The important price during the year is the Premium console which needs a $50-$100 price buffer to compete with the PS3 during the year when it makes up the bulk of the sales.
That 30% cut only applies to the people who want the Arcade SKU, it doesn't make up the bulk of the sales. The main Xbox 360 price cut came from the $50 or 15% cut on the Premium SKU, and overall sales are up by 'only' 17% but they would have been down by at least 10% YOY if not 20-30% without it so overall the price cut had a significant effect.
A comparison with the Gamecube/PS2 are moot, with the former the PS2 was the all out most wanted console and with the latter Sony uses it as a profit driver. They certainly did not have several years of increasing software sales to look forward to as an incentive to cut the price, the profit was on the console itself.
IMO the mole has it wrong or the whole story hasn't come out yet. They have already replaced the Arcade SKU with the 512mb model quietly and now they are probably looking to clear both the Premium and Elite so they can bring in SKUs with larger HDDs to coincide with direct downloads of games. They need 120GB minimum in the Xbox 360 and better would probably be something like 160 or 180GB if they wanted your average Premium owner to download games onto the system. There have already been rumours that they have been checking out larget HDD sizes like 320 and 500GB.
They have a focus on Natal, but they also need to keep momentum up so they can drive into the next holiday season with good momentum. To really launch Natal successfully they will need a lot of consoles on the ground to spur adoption from developers so they have the incentive to create software to give consumers the incentive to buy the interface. It makes their job a lot easier with 55M consoles sold than say 45M.
| Procrastinato said: Squilliam... |
You don't have to count just exclusives you know. Modern Warfare 2 + Bioshock 2+ Left 4 Dead 2+ Halo ODST covers the shooter front. Tekken 6covers the fighting game front, they have Mass Effect for the WRPG flavour, they have Forza 3 + NFS: Shift for racing, etc.
With more sales they divide the fixed costs over a wider base of consoles which lowers overall cost per console, they gain efficiencies in production and shipping, they have a hardware revision coming down the line which should lower cost by $10 at minimum per unit and the rest can be covered by accessories and game sales. They already stated that they broke even on accessories with the Arcade SKU and they sure do have a lot of them.
Heres a better calculation assuming 100% Arcade sales.
10,000,000 consoles sold @ $200 for a cost of $195
Theres a price cut to $150 and they save $15 from a revision and $5 from efficiencies of scale per console. Game royalties are $8 *7 over the lifetime of the machine and accessories (not incl HDD) are $20 from extra controllers. Total revenue per extra console = 64 + 20 = $76.
They cut the price to $150 and overall hardware sales rise to 14,000,000.
Overall hardware profit/loss = 14M *150 - 14M * 170 = ($280M)
Overall revenue on new hardware sold = 4M * 76 = $304M
Tease.
