L.A. Noire was once a six-disc game on Xbox 360

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Mr Puggsly said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

let's not mix things up: Sony initially shot itself in the foot, killing its HW profits for years, but users had a bigger benefit from it just because Sony accepted to pay the bill selling PS3 at a loss to push it and BD. I was referring to users benefit, not Sony one, that is quite arguable as we don't really know how many losses it was ready to suffer to make it win the format war (although it's obvious the losses were a lot higher than its best case scenario).

Another thing to not forget about optical disc space usefulness: if I'm not wrong, MS charges extra royalties for games on more than 2 discs, so devs make everything possible to avoid them exceed that space. Anyway, about this issue, it's just natural that extra disc space available becomes more useful as time goes by, and that initially it's less important, this has been good for MS, allowing it to not suffer because of it during XB360 first years. Finally, as I wrote other times, even if I don't trust MS, it's a good thing that it and Ninty soundly bashed Sony when it was becomig too arrogant, this benefitted competitors, SW houses and users, and I think Sony too, in the long term. Just as it's good that Ninty doesn't bury anymore MS and Sony in this part of the current gen, balance is good to cater for as many different gamer tastes as possible.

Well its clear Sony anticipated selling a lot more consoles at the higher price points. Surely they were prepared to take some losses, maybe $1 billion. That wouldn't be too difficult to earn back assuming the hardware and software sold significantly better. But since it launched they've lost like $6 billion and that's with PS2 and PSP profits. They could have bought Skype with that kind of money!

 

According to this article MS doesn't charge royalties for multiple discs. "Microsoft does not charge a royalty per disc, but there is a cost of  goods that goes along with manufacturing." http://www.shacknews.com/article/54795/ids-tim-willits-on-rage

So it does cost extra in the sense they gotta pay for the extra discs. Probably in the same way it cost more to make a fancy inlay, booklets, etc.

Isn't $6bln the losses for the whole division, including many products different from consoles? It includes R&D anyway, but yes, even considering unrelated and related but justifiable costs it's hefty compared to, for example, the estimated less than $1bln for Wii R&D, followed by HW profitable since launch, so no further losses (since Wii launch, IIRC, Ninty only had one or two quarters at a loss). It will be remembered as an example of the razor and blades model gone too far.    Although currently the chances of recovering (obviously considering SW and movies too, otherwise from HW only PS3 would need to sell at least 120M units to recover the losses, rough estimate based on initial heavy losses and the fact that even now that it's profitable, Sony will always get a relatively small margin to keep it competitive) aren't bad as they were before Slim and cut to $300 and even worse before the first significant cut to $400.

About the presumed MS royalty, curiously it looks like on the net there are only indirect sources both claiming or denying it. I can't find the link at the moment, but I read somewhere that additional royalties could be due not for MS fault but for the techs used in XB360 discs (like copy protection, etc) and this could be compatible with what Willits stated.

PS: Sorry for the late answer, net and phone not working for two days...