shikamaru317 said:
Where are you getting that notion from? I remember IHS did a hardware cost analysis of Xbox One |
This IHS nonsense has been peddled for years now so here is, once again, an approximate rundown of the Kinect2:
1. Development costs, including acquiring software/hardware companies: Probably crude estimate $400M, ToF chip being the main culprit.
2. Kinect2 contains three zero-redundancy chips, an RGBI chip, an extremely performant ToF chip, and a complex controller/preprocessor chip. These chips cost at least $60-80 to manufacture (less capable ToF chips cost around $250-$500 at the time).
3. How many Kinects2 were actually manufactured, less than 15mio? That means every Kinect2 was additionally hammered with around $30 non-recoupable development costs.
4. The rest of Kinect2 was not cheap hardware either, this was an outstanding product in every way.
In the end, it is inexpliccable how a company like IHS can get to $75 if they wanted to be taken seriously. I think there was a Reddit forum thread where one of the developers mentioned Kinect2 actually had similar costs than the console itself. Probably an exxageration but not by far.
All things considered, I'd not be surprised if the cost of each Kinect2 actually sold was anywhere above the $200 range. So when MS dropped Kinect2 and stopped production of it, massive savings occured (depending on applicable manufacturing contracts for it, supermassive savings).
Now, at least in Euroland, XBoxOne saw a massive price drop after about two years. There wasn't a week when you couldn't buy a box for E199-229 (final price, that included taxes and store margins which are NOT zero in Euroland). Towards the end, ridiculous price drops to E99 happened during holiday seasons.
So SKMBlake's conclusion
unlike the Xbox One hardware where it was sold at a loss, during pretty much its entire life
pretty much reflected and still reflects reality in Euroland.
