How much money MS really made with the Xbox 360

[pokoko]

thranx said:

pokoko said:
I have a question. Beyond that initial $1.2B write off for the RRoD, extending the warranty must have cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars in the following years. It was still a subject that we were trained on when I worked with Microsoft last year, so it's still a cost factor internally. My question is, where does that extended cost show up? Are customer service and warranty losses debited against the gaming division?

they put the 1 billion aside for the future cost of the failed devices, not for ones that had already failed, but also for the ones that were going to fail. So its already accounted for.

Even if that's true, I doubt it accounts for everything.  To Microsoft's credit, the upgrades they made to the 360 warranty service were major and dramatic, which means they were very expensive.  Adding repair staff, paying for shipping, fixing production problems, retraining customer service, even extending the warranty on repaired consoles.  As I said, it still accounts for costs, even today.  Also, I'm pretty sure that $1.2B write-off was retroactive, as I remember that people who paid for repairs were reimbursed.  This was a hugely expensive undertaking and there is no way they could have foreseen the total cost or pulled all the costs under one umbrella.  The truth is, we'll probably never know the final price tag.  All we can really know is that it was massive and likely impacted many departments.