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Squilliam on 12 November 2010
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disolitude said:
Squilliam said:
disolitude said:


As it was said before, no one is forcing you to buy it at that price. After buying it myself, I believe 149 is more than a fair price for Kinect.

It may cost 60 bucks to make when looking at components but R&D and man hours spent on getting this thing to market were not free.

People are starting to expect everything to be sold at a loss when it comes to consoles and that is the only thing that is...

Not cool.

I had that impression too. Although it does feel we're moving a little past that stage. I think a large part of it had to do with a protest at how Nintendo sold so many units at a profit. However im sure when the next generation rolls around we'll have consoles sold at a profit with additional services also sold at a profit on top of that. Sony pioneering and then succumbing to their own razor/blade model will see to that.


Yep...thats just it.  PS1's launch made it a norm to sell consoles at a loss and since then more and more people expect this from hardware manufacturers. Nintendo has always been smart about it and have gotten a lot of slack about it in the past...

I think however that the hardware race is going to be dying down which should destroy the razorblade model...it will be all about cool new gameplay ideas, console features and games as always. The days of packing every last gigapixel and GFLOP in to a console and selling it on that merrit are done and done.

It seems like we're in a sort of software and services race. Netflix, ESPN, marketplaces, game store, online gaming, music/game content subscriptions seem to be taking centre stage. To even be in such a race the razor/blade model is out as you cannot be sure of a person even buying enough profitable content to make up for losses incurred and the game play model has to be balanced against the needs of people who want to play just media files so the interface has to fit both.

Probably the best fit model for the next generation consoles is the iPad. A multipurpose device with development costs amortised over millions of devices which other smaller specialised devices cannot compete with. Its funny how people complain about the cost of an iPad when a fancy universal remote costs just as much for instance. A jack of all trades is a master of its own R and D expenditure!



Tease.