| 3sexty said: And I wouldnt call Xbox One a flop without providing some more uesful context. They are still supporiting it and even providing new h/w releases into the coming year - and now making gains on Sony's primary money maker (in the u.s). |
NA is by no way Sony's primary money maker (as far as consoles are concerned).
Sony went into this battle with a clear loss beind them (X360 vs PS3 was 2:1 in NA). Nobody in their wildest dreams at Sony imagined they would be leading this time (Ps4 vs X1 1.1:1 in NA) and probably come out ahead. So right from the start they carefully calculated their plans with the idea of gaining traction in NA and avoid another 2:1 loss. I'm pretty sure they are still baffled they make so much more money in NA than foreseen.
The main money maker for Sony is outside NA. Just consider what happened in Europe (and Asia, too) this summer. around the time when Microsoft introduced the XBox Slim, they jacked up the PS4 prices back to full list price. While Microsoft came in with $249 AAA game bundles. The result was that MS actually sold more consoles that Sony for a while - while losing horrible amounts of money on hardware (MS got less than $200 for a box that costs over $300 to manufacture according to iSupply, while Sony raked in loads of cash).Onyl now during christmas time have both company reduced the price into the (unhealthy) $249 price range. If you want to one-up the argument, Sony is actually significantly reducing the losses by selling fewer PS4 than last year. So I doubt anyone at Sony is even slightly worried about current NA console sales numbers.
If you want some useful context, right here it was - one company losing bizarre amounts of money on hardware for months, while the other company makes hay (the iSupply estimate is debatably too high but the fact remains that roughly a third of the hardware revenue has been a loss for the MS camp for months now. As has been said before by others, these losses can be hidden by other stuff MS sells but I highly doubt again that upper managment is going to tolerate these losses forever).
