| JEMC said:
The Xbox360 was launched for $299/$399 and was a beast. Sure they took heavy losses, but they can afford them. What's stopping them to do something similar this time? About power consumption, many people don't know how much power does their console use, and many more don't even care. The only problem with the power consumption is the related heat, that's the biggest problem .. for the manufacturers. Oh, and WiiU uses twice as much power as Wii, but it's about the same that the actual Xbox360 and PS3 while being more powerful than those. Msoft and Sony could go with a 200W console and be a lot more powerful than WiiU, if the cooling is enough for that task it shouldn't be a problem. |
What I was suggesting is that they would have to take significantly larger losses to preserve their price point ...
Nintendo is not incompetent and it is unlikely that Sony or Microsoft could produce a dramatically more powerful system than they could for the same price using the same amount of energy. So, if Nintendo is spending 50% more to manufacturer the system (excluding the controller) and it is using twice the electricity it is moderately safe to assume that Sony and Microsoft would need to increase their manufacturing cost by at least 50% and use at least twice as much electricity to maintain their processing power advantage. Suppose Microsoft los $100 per XBox 360 at $300/$400 meaning their manufacturing cost was $400/$500, if it costs 50% more to maintain their processing power advantage the manufacturing cost increases to $600/$750 and Microsoft loses $300/$350 per system sold; even by Microsoft standards that is insane.
Now, you're right that people don't care about the power consumption directly but they do care about the size, noise and failure rate of their systems which are all indirectly impacted by energy consumption. The PS3 was dramatically bigger than the PS2 at launch and if the PS4 was a 400 watt monster it is likely that you would see a proportionate increase in the size of the PS4 compared to the PS3; and you would likely have a very large fan on at all times that was quite loud to keep the console from over-heating.
