Wii U vs PS4 vs Xbox One FULL SPECS (January 24, 2014)

[Andrespetmonkey]

Viper1 said:

Andrespetmonkey said:

Viper1 said:
And a $100 loss per console is far too much for them as a company now than it was back in 2006. In 2006, they were a financially sound comapny. That is not the case today. If they sold 10 million units at a $100 loss, that's a $1 billion loss to a company that can't handle taking on another billion dollar loss.

They won't make a $1 billion loss. They'll lose that much on consoles, but make it back within maybe a year through software sales and to a much lesser extent peripheral sales (if they make a profit), give it another 6 months oon top of that for R&D, manufacturing and what not.

Viper buys a PS4, Sony loses $100. Viper then buys 5 or 6 retail games over the next year, a few smaller downloadbles and maybe some Minis, subscribes to Netflix, maybe a new streaming service or PS4 or PS+, he makes some microtransactions on F2P games, possibly buys another controller or PS eye/Move 2 (or whatever they may have)... etc.

That money is definitely made back (unless it's PS3 scale money), it's just a matter of how long it takes. A year/year and a half due to $100? Not a problem. 

You are trivializing how hard it is to regain $1 billion on hardware losses.   If it were that easy, Why don't Sony and MS chop off $100 from their consoles right now? Because they don't need to, they can gain a profit AND sell their system for a price that'll sell well. The loses on the console at the start is so they can make it as powerful as possible but still try and sell it at a reasoble price, as you know.

I wouldn't say I'm trivialising, I'm simplifying. You haven't countered my point, do you think they can't make it back through software in a year? Do you think a year is too long? 

And your quote, "unless we are talking PS3 scale money" is exactly what I talked about in the rest of my post.  Why didn't you address that?  Because we aren't talking about a PS3-scale loss. A $100 loss on the PS4 that'll most likely use slightly modified "off-the-shelf" parts is not on the same scale as PS3's situation. That was pulled from the middle of my post.