Is the Xbox One a failure?

[IFireflyl]

Burek said:

IFireflyl said:

Juma009 said:
The only thing that defines if it's a success or failure is the existence of profit for MS, too bad such information is not out.

You have the math I did in my previous post. The Xbox One through December 2014 cost Microsoft approximately $55 million. Microsoft has over 46 million Xbox Live Gold members. At $50/year that's approximately $2,300,000,000 they're making every year. The console itself isn't supposed to profit. None of the Xbox or Playstation consoles ever made a profit. So the math is out. The Xbox One is not a failure. It has surpassed the Xbox 360 in sales. It has lost less money than the Xbox 360. They still have billions in revenue coming in from Xbox Live Gold. The Xbox One is, empirically, not a failure.

Your math is still OK, they are making a ton on Gold subs. However, that number is the combination of Gold and Silver (free) accounts.

Realistically, their Gold subs are around 50-60% of that number (MS very rarely discloses that number separately).

That is a valid point. Thank you for that. Let's low-ball it, and say they have 23 million Xbox Live Gold members (50% of the 46 million). With 23 million Xbox Live Gold members at $60/year (I just realized it was up from $50/year) that is $1,380,000,000. Again, that is me rounding down/low-balling it. So in the first 14 months Microsoft lost approximately $55 million on the Xbox One (which was a substantially smaller loss than in the first 14 months they sold the Xbox 360), and they brought in at least $1.38 billion. That's still a win.