Squilliam on 25 July 2009
| ookaze said: Well, this financial quarter results just shows that at nearly 4 years old, the XB360 is still not a profitable business, and at this rate, will never break even. I'm not surprised: MS was never able to compete in any market. If they don't have their monopoly to help them (Windows and its apps), they fail miserably as always, and always take down their partners with them. The outcome till now is abysmal: $6+ or $9 billions in the hole depending on what you include, lots of internal studios closed, lots of 3rd parties going down with them, some game genres nearly destroyed, a new low on console IQ, introduction of pay to play online, ... All of that for nearly nothing. What is alarming is that they had part of their monopoly to help them, in the form of Direct X. MS has to release a new console next gen anyway, to keep Direct X as the default for games. If the other consoles were to become dominant, OpenGL would rise with it, and Direct X would fade. They already lost the codec war on video codec for optical media (BluRay won, destroying MS chances to install its WMV/WMA formats, and allowing H264 and Apple Quicktime to shine), and on audio codec and container (Apple QuickTime and AAC), they can't afford to lose the grip on game middleware too. XB360 was losing so much money that they quickly put the division among the other entertainment profitable business, to hide the heavy losses. Zune, Media Center, Mobile, ..., they are all profitable or very profitable. They bring less revenue but at least are profitable. Of course, XBox is the sole area that is losing money in this division. They cut the price, and the previously barely profitable division went in the hole again. But they had to, they didn't even sell as many consoles as the previous fiscal year, despite cutting the price before the holidays. |
Lets see: The zune isn't released worldwide because I believe Balmer said that it would lose them more money to do so. Media Center? I don't really see that as being an area of high revenue, Windows mobile was barely breaking even before the iPhone and massive investment to compete. They made all of 5M before they joined it with E+D.
Xbox 360 revenue = 5.6B
Cost of revenue for Xbox 360 and others = 4.3B
R+D = 1.8B
Believe what you want, but at least back up your statements with some evidence.
Tease.
