ZenfoldorVGI said:
You can't go by legacy figures when you are determining a company's health. You have to look at the company as a whole, not one single division, and you have to figure out the goals of the companies, and the RELATIVE net loss they are taking.
I said what I've said, because I believe MS is a much healthier company than Sony, atm. They hold the rights to the perpetually successful windows OS, and can apparently afford to blow 10 billion dollars on destroying Playstation dominance on home consoles. However, it is unknown if Sony would be willining to take even a 10th of that loss. Sony is in the console gaming business to turn a profit, MS was initially in the console gaming business to disrupt competition to its Windows OS.
Thus, imo, Sony is more questionable than MS, since it has taken some serious losses this gen, while the Xbox brand is on an upswing in popularity, Playstation gaming has certainly declined drastically. I have a hard time believing Sony boardmembers would be willing to take the chance on a new console for many more years, especially if their other sectors are underperforming.
I do wonder what would happen if next generation, Sony released an underpowered console? Would the fans of the high end graphics on the PS3 this gen jump ship, or would they simply change their argument? It certainly didn't seem to matter to them when the PS2 had significantly less graphical power than that of the other consoles last generation.
No matter how you look at it, this generation has been a loss by Sony and a huge boon to Microsoft and Nintendo. We tend to get mixed up in the trees and forget the forest. No one in their right mind would have predicted how consoles sales this generation would have came out, 6 years ago, and saying Nintendo would have the first place console would have been laughable.
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First of all, Microsoft's "plan" didn't work. Sony's fall from grace in the video game market is due solely to their own tremendous gaffe's, the most noticeable one being that they released a ridiculously over-engineered $600 dollar console. It was nothing that Microsoft did. Even then, the margin by which they have outsold the PS3 is negligable, especially when you consider that the difference in sales right now is virtually equal to the amount of 360s that had been sold when then the PS3 was launched. That being said, both platforms have moved about the same amount of hardware in the same period of time even though the PS3 has been more expensive with a smaller game library for most of its lifespan.
The Xbox 360 may have sold more than the OG Xbox, but that's not really saying much when the latter only sold 24 million units last gen. MS really had nowhere to go but up. They'd have had to make some mistakes on par with 90's Sega to actually sell less. MS is in the exact same position it was in last generation, which is a distant second place with an insignificant lead over the third place competitor. If the 360 were really doing so great, then why is it that the only system it's managed to outsell all generation is the PS3? Sure, it looks good as long as you ignore the face that it's taking the exact same beating from Nintendo and just focus on the last-place console.
As far as Natal goes, there are going to be a lot of dissapointed people on these forums. First of all, no controller add-on that was released several years into a generation/console's lifespan has ever had any kind of significant effect, and Natal wont' be any different. First of all, it won't have a 100% attach rate, which means that third parties aren't going to pay much attention to it, which goes without saying considering that nearly all of the Wii's most popular games are in-house titles, and MS's in-house talent is really nothing to write home about. Another thing that people don't seem to get is that the reason for Nintendo's success this gen with the DS stylus & touchscreen and the Wii's Wiimote & Nunchuk is software that appeals to everyone, something MS has yet to achieve. Every title like this that MS has attempted(Lips, Scene It, Kameo, Viva Pinata, Banjo & Kazooie) has been an unimitigated failure on all fronts. Very few people will care about it because the demographic that it's meant to target has already been snatched up by the Wii and its more appealing software, and Natal will just be soon as a weaker version of the Wiimote. Really, had Nintendo released the Wiimote as an add-on for the Gamecube in 2004, would it have made any kind of a difference?
While Natal's imminent failure may not cause MS to exit the home console business, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it did in fact tarnish the Xbox brand.
