| Galaki said: When people are used to Sony selling their consoles at a lose, it's hard to justify buying from Nintendo with them making huge profit. |
That's from the market being sick.
Normal product profits from the retail sale on top of marketing costs, Sony used to lose money or break even without counting marketing. Consoles used to be a generation behind computers and arcades, with Sony that gap became even and the profit(and reliability in many cases) erased or diminished.
There are benefits to that model, but also downsides. We've just about had all the benefit it could bring gaming at this point, or at least the larger chunks of it, and are now left with mostly the downsides.
The problem with the razor/blade model in gaming is it eliminates risk taking from the point of view of design and overall approach. A console like the DS would never have been made if Sony was in control of the handheld market, and that includes a lot of its edgy software like Brain Training which didn't profit with game sales(counting marketing).
Profit with the hardware breathes room to innovation and new types of approaches. With Sony's model everybody selling hardware is scared shitless all the time, fearful of steping a mere inch outside of guaranteed sales.
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