@GC. Not competing in terms of sales, but competing in terms of capabilities. The same was possible with the Wii where the opportunity to compete its sales (in parallel) presented itself.

GC were more than capable indeed. I fully agree that Wii could have used a little bit more power =)

;)

good thread,
well obviously nintendo and microsoft have gained this gen,surely nintendo's handheld market can carry them all the way to the moon,i think the PS2 was casual too obviously as it sold so much and with dvd and every movie/toy tie in going

it seems like you are asking if 8m people will play cod online with the wiiu or something similar,i don't know but call me old fashioned i think consoles need to be making a profit on every one sold and now you will need to have a decent online capacity for games/movies/tv and what not if you want to survive in the hardware business but then some people seem to think consoles are on their way out although i can only see online gaming getting bigger and bigger with better tech and more connectivity

It's so funny, I always thought that the system that sold the most consoles was the undisputed winner.

This generation proved otherwise.

Nintendo certainly won the hardware race, that is undisputed, Nintendo sold the most hardware, period.

Nintendo however is not the winner of this console generation.

That crown my friends belong to Microsoft and their Xbox 360.

Microsoft stated this when, exactly? I certainly agree that the last few years have been good for the 360, 2011 in particular, but you can't just magic away the deficits it incurred early in life and proclaim it a good investment from 2008 onward.

I draw conclusions based on the best data I have available, and that information suggests that, over it's life, the 360 has operated at best around break-even. 

If Microsoft wants to prove me wrong, they can make a public statement that they've earned a good profit on all the money they've invested in the 360 over the course of this generation and I'll believe them. But they won't. They'll boast of revenues, of units sold in the US, of Xbox Live subscriptions... anything but the bottom line. Those are the kind of metrics companies brag about when they can't brag about profits. Why should I give the 360 the benefit of the doubt when, as you note, Microsoft is deliberately obfuscating numbers to exploit doubt?

The point is that you don't need to give the benefit of any doubt because there is not enough information to decide either way. The way Microsoft organises themselves is so opaque that they can change the profit value simply by changing the royalty the EDD gets for instance from retail sales of office and Windows. Whether the 360 has done worse than or significantly better than what the average person expects they aren't going to break out that information because it is considered comercially sensitive.

Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are substantially different companies with different strengths and weaknesses and Sony's influence on the home console market created an environment where the "conventional" system played towards Sony's strengths and played against Nintendo's weaknesses. Even with superior technology and some very impressive first party games the Gamecube struggled in the market because of these conditions.

What Nintendo has done with the DS, Wii, 3DS, and (probably) the Wii U is introduce asymmetry in the market where they're producing systems that primarily play towards their strengths. You can call it a "Blu-Ocean" strategy if you want but, at its core, it is really about Nintendo designing their own systems rather than letting Sony or Microsoft design their system indirectly.

With that said, it is my belief that all three console manufacturers could have been much more successful with modest changes to their strategy in the previous generation. Had Microsoft or Sony produced more modest systems that launched at (roughly) $300 while still producing a significant improvement in visuals they would have likely seen (nearly) double their sales had their competition kept the same strategy; and had Nintendo been able to produce a system that was able to render "HD console" graphics at 480p, or "Wii level" graphics at 720p, I think they could have seen stronger sales all else being equal.