drkohler said:
Indeed, but we can at least guesstimate the losses from "normal industry behaviour". And we should define what we mean by "losses". We know that MS had an ADDITIONAL (emphasis required) 1.2billion charged to rrod in a fy report, so we can conclude that losses (true losses) are anywhere from 1.3-?billions. Incidentally we know from that guy that once posted - and then got lawsuited the hell out of him - that the initial run of Xboxes were 100% doa) Then we have the losses from Kinect (which mostly are NOT true losses) probably around 0.5-1billion. On the PS3 side we have about 3billion losses over blu-ray (probably half are NOT true losses) and cell R&D (which was split into three companies). So my guess is both company lost about the same amount of money in true losses (meaning this was money not related to "real product development"). |
I've not got time to trawl the figures up but most estimates put the losses for the PS3 in the region of 5 billion and the 360 this generation at a loss of around 1 billion. They really aren't similar in losses this generation and the 360 figure is horribly skewed being in the same division as some unsuccessful hardware such as Zune and Surface that have likely made zero profit. Sony have lost several billion more and have not had those losses offset by success in other areas of the business.
The problem I have with Mazty's made up figure is that the failure rate dropped sharply with each new revision of the GPU and CPU. If and that is a massive IF there was a rate of around 50% it affected around only 3-5 million consoles before the first GPU revision occured. Before we got to 20 million units sold the Falcon chipset was released which pretty much brought the failure rate in line with the PS3. It's highly unlikely the RROD situation cost much more than the 1 billion Microsoft set aside for the extra warranty cost. The biggest cost of RROD is it robbed them of the chance to win this gen.
