| Soundwave said:
The Famicom was baically sold at cost. So was the Super NES and N64. And GameCube for that matter. The idea of selling hardware at cost and making money off the games has been around for a good decade before Sony even sniffed the game industry if not longer. It's why it's called the razor blade model, because it mimics the shaving industry. Yamauchi is famous for saying 'the console is just a box people have to buy to play Mario on'. In other words the game machine is a barrier to entry. |
Based off the table above I'm willing to bet that none of the systems you mentioned were sold at a loss.
Really ? Then it must have been some Atari or some other gaming company that started it.
The console maybe the barrier to entry however judging from that table I highly doubt that would attempt a loss leader model and it's not like the parts weren't cheap seeing as how the NES was already using old technology when it first debuted. The top of the line processor at that time was the Intel 80286 and not a 6502.
