d21lewis on 18 February 2011
A couple of things:
- From what I understand, the $500 million is the entire marketing budget, not the Kinect marketing budget.
- Selling the console isn't where the bulk of the money is made. Kinects cost next to nothing to make. Also, game sales are where consoles make their money. It's the "Razor blade" model. You lose money on the "razor" and make money on the "blades".
- Without the marketing, new re-design, and Kinect, who's to say how bad 360 sales would be? Certainly not as good as they are, now. It would probably be like the other consoles on the market--at a decrease for the year.
- It said in the article that M$'s increase was 1,148,500 consoles over a set period of time where it could have been 1,666,666 if they'd just taken their marketing money and bought 360's with it over the same period of time. It's not like 360 sales are going to suddenly stop. With the money spent marketing, I can only assume that more people are aware of 360's and Kinect and more consoles will sell in the future as a result. Spending a large amount of money now to make more money later--that's how businesses work, right? I guess Coca Cola shouldn't have advertised at the Superbowl. Instead, they should have taken their millions of dollars and bought Coca Cola with it. That way, sales would improve because they bought their own.......no. That's fucking retarded.
