"Wii U hardware is on par with current gen consoles"

[DanneSandin]

RolStoppable said:

There are threads about these things every now and then, this is the first one that showed up in my Google search. I think the numbers are up to March 31st 2011 for Sony and Nintendo and June 30th 2011 for Microsoft. Sony's and Nintendo's financial years end in March, although their count differs. What's 2011 for Nintendo is 2010 for Sony. Microsoft's financial year ends in June. Sony's and Microsoft's numbers are only for their gaming divisions or the division where their consoles are lumped into, not the companies as a whole.

Now the numbers of such charts aren't always entirely accurate, because whoever compiled them may have used a (slightly) wrong exchange rate to convert Sony's and Nintendo's yen numbers into dollars. But the numbers you see here should be pretty good. It's easy to see the effect of the PS3 on Sony's financials. Likewise, the rebound of the 360 is clearly visible in Microsoft's numbers.

Sony and Microsoft are battling over the living room, so even if one of them did poorly, I don't think they would back out immediately. It would definitely take more than one bad generation for them to give up, two in a row might not even stop them. As you can see in the chart, Sony did very poorly this generation, but they will come back with the PS4. Likewise, Microsoft did very poorly with the Xbox, but they made the 360 regardless. There's much more at stake than just gaming for these two companies, so they won't exit the market easily.

To me, as a mere wannabe amateur, it doesn't make sense to invest so heavily in a product and not getting my money back... It's even worse if I only kept losing it! At some time you just gotta withdraw and say "enough is enough"... How come they're still in the game? Well, I understand why they will be around for another generation - but if that one goes bad... Why hang in there?