Cerebralbore101 said:
Pemalite said:
The number of hardware units shifted doesn't constitute a success or failure.
It's profit... If your platform is unprofitable, then it has failed at it's main purpose for existing... Which is making money.
Which is why a PC handheld that sells 10 million units is stupidly successful, but the WiiU or Vita at 15 million is a bomb.
The Playstation 5 has generated more profit than the PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 consoles... Combined. It is Sony's most successful console.
Likewise, Xbox series has generated more profit than Xbox One or Xbox 360, which is why Microsoft can justify next-gen hardware. |
PC handhelds don't need to sell a ton because the storefront of Steam is already there. On the flipside a game console that fails means a failed storefront. Didn't the PS5 have a profit margin of 6%? And wasn't that why they pushed PC ports, because they wanted to wring a little more profit out of their videogame business? Also, profit isn't everything. Keep in mind that PS1 and PS2 never had online fees to charge people. PS3 online was free for a while. And games are released digitally, so they can't be resold. Bragging about profit while ripping customers off at every corner and then claiming that a device is "more successful" than a predecessor that charged fair prices isn't an argument I would want to make.
As for Xbox, MS can say whatever they want about it and it wouldn't matter. Xbox profit is a rounding error compared to their PC business and Xbox doesn't have its own separate section on their financial reports. Xbox is bundled in with the Moore Personal Computing segment of their business, which includes a massive amount of non-gaming PC revenue, as well as services revenue. On top of that Xbox is a third party publisher now, so good luck separating the profits of Bethesda, Actiblizz, and Forza games not sold on an Xbox from Xbox proper. It's all a massive tangled mess.
To figure out how much money Xbox proper makes or doesn't make, you would need to force Microsoft to be broken up into multiple companies. They would have to be Bethesda, Microsoft, Xbox, Activision, and Blizzard. Unless you did that, any claim of Xbox being this profitable or that profitable is pointless. |
