thismeintiel said:
1. How many people do you think use their iPhone for strictly gaming? I'll go out on a limb and say none. It's a phone first and for most. I would even say that probably half or more NEVER play games on it. Now, if you want to go with the iPod Touch, than that would be fine, as the main draw of that was it's capability to play more advanced games. And as of April 2010, Apple had only shipped 35 mil of them. That's a little over half of what the PSP has shipped. So no, Sony is in 2nd place. 3. You do realise that MS probably has the same amount of, if not more, people they have to pay for the 360, right? And yet, they were able to get the price of the Arcade to $199 about 2 years ago and $149 recently. The situation with the PS2 wasn't much different than the PS3, either. They teamed with Toshiba for the CPU. They also had to pay Rambus for its RDRAM. And God only knows what other parts are third party. As far as the DVD and Blu-ray royalties go, I don't believe you have to keep paying over and over with each player you produce. If memory serves me right, it's a one time licensing fee for the right to produce the player, with maybe a small % per disc if you produce/sell those. And considering Sony had a part to play in the creation of DVD and Blu-ray, I doubt they have to pay anything. The only reason PS3 was so high to begin with, is because Sony invested a lot of time and research in the advancement of TWO techs. The Cell architecture and Blu-ray. However, as both of those mature over the next couple of years, the prices will drop incredibly. We will eventually see Blu-ray players for $50. And many movies have already dropped to prices comparable to their DVD equivalent (usually only a $5 difference). And the advancement of the Cell will mean a cheaper, better version of it in the PS4. |
1. By that metric how many people play games on the PSP? The attach rate suggests that fewer than half of the PSPs are actively used for gaming. Between the iTouch iPhone and iPad I believe they are over 100M shipped. The hardware is simply a means to sell software, since Apple has higher revenue and higher sales thats the most important part. Usually hardware is focused upon because software tends to follow hardware shipments quite closely, this however isn't the case with the PSP which sells 1/3rd of the software the PS3 and Xbox 360 do respectively.
3. The Xbox 360 is simpler by design, its more similar to the PS2 than the PS3 is to the PS2 in respect to being able to lower the production costs to the absolute minimum. In addition to this they have a better source of revenue than Sony because their Xbox Live subscriptions are worth as much as selling one first party game to every console on average every year. The PS3 will remain a complicated/more expensive design for the forseeable future because they have two 128 bit memory buses, Blu Ray, HDD in every SKU and Nvidia are bitches in regard to royalties.
They do have to pay the Blu Ray consortium then another division gets the payback from royalties after expenses are taken out, the reason why Sony pushed the PS3 with Blu Ray is because they hold something like 90% of the frabrication plants under their own control and their patents relate to the disc itself and not the players. Unfortunately they only turned a profit with these recently.
