It is true.
Xbox One Has Higher Ratio Of Digital Game Sales Than Other Platforms – Analyst (gamingbolt.com)
And I do have numbers to show that. RE8 physical sales split was 80/20 PS/XB. Total sales (including digital) was 65/35. That's a 30-percentage swing.
1) They claimed hardware does not make a profit. The division as a whole is profitable. Consoles (especially high-end consoles like PS, Xbox) are typically sold at a loss or barely breaking even. Both Sony and MS make the majority of their profits from software and services, not hardware.
Sony is no different in that regard
"Sony’s Chief Executive Officer Kenichiro Yoshida has said the business should be judged by the number of active users, not the number of hardware units sold."
Sony Is Struggling With PlayStation 5 Price Due to Costly Parts (yahoo.com)
And Xbox's active users are growing, so according to the Sony CEO himself, Xbox's gaming business is doing well. You going to try to claim the Sony CEO is wrong?
2) "3rd party sales are far lower than during their 360 days." Wrong.
"We exceeded $2 billion in revenue from third-party titles this quarter for the first time," Nadella informed.
So yeah, third-party profits are higher now than even during the 360 days.
Yeah PS is doing better, but so what? Xbox is doing incredibly well and is a viable platforms for consumers and developers.
3) Xbox is now anchored in the cloud, which is by far MS's biggest and safest money-maker. Xbox is future-proof. When you have the MS CEO state multiple times about how Xbox is important to MS, and appear in public with Phil Spencer, you know there are serious. Never did former CEOs Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates, talk about Xbox as extensively as Satya does.
If Xbox financials were that bad, do you think Satya would have approved of spending of billions of dollars to acquire studios for Xbox? Better yet, you think Zenimax would have have looked over at the financials of their potential new parent subdivision, and then agreed to be purchased? lol
4) "It def does matter to JP devs. If less than 10% of sales are on Xbox then its incredibly easy for them to be Playstation exclusive."
Yeah true, the price for them to be PS exclusive is probably lower. But it would still be very easy for them to be MS exclusive. Reminder that MS could have easily paid for those games to be exclusive/timed even with the smaller market share, but they seem focused on acquiring studios and doing Game Pass deals. Because the big AAA JP exclusives Sony has (Ghostwire Tokyo, Final Fantasy, Forspoken) they were paid for.
You know Epic Games has probably a ~5% PC marketshare and has no problems getting PC exclusives right? if you have enough cash (like Epic or MS), the market share can and will easily be overlooked.
Last edited by hiccupthehuman - on 14 June 2021
