Gaming's worst marketing/business decisions?

[foxtail]

DonFerrari said:

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The fact that you can't read a DVD movie on it doesn't make the drive itself much cheaper I suppose (and you are just throwing a conjecture, not an evidence) and I told you that the royalties weren't big so I'll give you the very high royalty prices

DVD-ROM Drive

The greater of: (ⅰ) 4% of the net selling price (up to a maximum of US$8.00 per drive) or (ⅱ) US$4.00 per drive; US$2.00 per drive on or after the effective date of the New DVD6C License Agreement

 

That info is "As of January 1, 2016" the royalty scheme may or may not have been higher in 2000 (PS2) or in 2001 (Gamecube/Xbox).

Even now the greater of the two is still $8 US per console, that's no small addition to the price of the console.  A lot of people forget that DVD movie playback was NOT included in the original Xbox out of the box either.  You needed to buy a $30 dongle to unlock the DVD movie playback on the original Xbox.

Microsoft was a company with unlimited resources and spared no expense when it came to the original Xbox hardware, but they still didn't want to eat the fee for DVD movie playback.