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thismeintiel on 17 December 2016
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3sexty said:
drkohler said:

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).

I have been hearing this for way wat too long now.. and that was even during the Steve Balmer CEO days. MS now even have a hardcore shareholder centric supposedly xbox hater  CEO- Satya Nadella and even under his leadership we continue to see new variants and new releases of xbox one, into next year and 2018 in fact. Seriously, given the trend of the ongoing support (and who knows why) - if your arguement that it is a huge money hole is to be believed, - then by the time they do decide to ditch it, the whole concept of consoles will become irrelevent even for Sony (which is why MS are putting in place clever platform integration solutions in place for gaming- another story anyway). Again heard this for way too long - since the incredible RROD losses of the 360.  I am starting to not believe this argument at all now.  it is just way to convenient but never actually validated as the years pass by.

When Steve Balmer was CEO, Xbox was at its peak. Sure, it still came in 3rd, but it made them money. Any shareholder complaints were about the division still not seeing a profit OVERALL after a full decade.  Still, it was making them money at that time. We heard those complaints getting louder, and even Bill Gates confirm he'd be fine if Xbox was sold or spun off, when Xbox stumbled out the gate and continued to not gain much steam. This gen they'll come in 2nd, but it'll be at 1/2 the numbers the 360 pulled in, maybe less. And really, MS taking Xbox off of some of their products near the start of the gen, while pushing Windows 10 at E3 more than Xbox and basically taking away all Xbox exclusives to pad out their Windows game store, aren't exactly good signs for the Xbox brand.

Also, I wouldn't consider new HW revisions anything meaningful. The Slim is a way to cut costs. It was always going to happen, even if it was just to benefit MS. And it wouldn't surprise me if the Scorpio is pushed as much as, if not more, a Windows 10 machine than as a Xbox.  And if that does poorly, it most definitely will perform worse than the Pro, I seriously think MS is going to rethink releasing a new Xbox for next gen. Sony is guaranteed to release a PS5, with the success of PS4 and the PS name being added to some of its products.