MS can take billions in loss, but as a bussiness why would they pursuit loss just to please forum goers and some fanboys??? They care about their goals. They make expectations of sales and price point to meet that and how much that will cost... they will always weight what is the biggest benefit for them. Sony have showed that they preffer bigger sales than profit per HW, Nintendo preffer profit on HW than big sales, MS is more in the middle (going by 7th gen and some of 8th)... but sure all of that could change.

I sense a new slim SKU incoming. Priced at $350.

Not only would it directly compete with the slim version of the PS4 (at $350) but it will also allow MS not to sell X1's at loss anymore.

Yes, by the end of the year both consoles will have their slim version already out.

DonFerrari said: Ka-pi96 said: tak13 said: Ka-pi96 said: Awww It will surely just be temporary though. I can't see them keeping it at that price much longer. So you want MS to keep lose tons of money... Well I'm not an investor, I don't really care about that. I'm a gamer and bigger install base means it's more likely to get more games. So yeah I'd prefer consoles sold to money earned. Yep... the only reason I don't want Sony to sell the consoles for a too great loss is because that could divert money from developing games... but yes... as gamers if a company take a billion loss to double or triple the fanbase and that translates to more games we don't need to care.

As a XBox gamer 'you' should care about the continuation of the XBox Brand; there won't be another XBox after the successor of XOne if this successor will be disappointing like XOne. Even the rich MS is not here into videogames to waste money.  

You will never double or triple the fanbase making this very aggressive deals in just NA and UK for 8 weeks per year.  You increase your Global User base by a 5-7% losing hundreds of millions $$$. You will never regain this selling a slighty bigger % of games and accessories unless you do it for a long time.  And nobody will ever give you back the wasted money. MS was forced to do it because they were in a very critical situation, they had no choice. They conceived the X1 in a way MS truly believed it could work, of course, it's their creauture. But it didn't, poor sales, so they tried with the Kinect-Less SKU, but still PS4 was killing the X1.  So ? What to do when you get crushed in your Own Territory by PS4 when 360 dominated in NA vs PS3 ?  They were forced to make another price cut and go with insane deals. Of course it worked, giving away games in that way... this is not a strategy to have a slighty bigger user base so that you sell more games and accessories, it was the final move to get out from a critical situation and get some hype/momentum and talking.

I'm not an MS fan or Xbox gamer... so if they burned 10B dollars and still failed I wouldn't mind much. But since I have friends who game on X1 I expect it to be sucessfull enough to have good games and spam a X2.

But I don't see much MS can do to truly win the gen (even if only in USA), they seem more keen on putting good numbers on holidays and that is it.

This makes those people wrong who thought Microsoft had deep pockets to do whatever they wanted, but surely they did not. Those insane holiday deals were some desperate attempts to gain marketshare and I have to say that they have succeeded.

From the beggining we knew that was faulty logic... If MS was interested in throwing endless money just to stay ahead (and please fanboys) they would have done it on X360 that would cost less and were quite closer (if they had throw enough on it could have passed Wii long ago)... so I don't know why they expected MS to do it for X1, they will throw as much as necessary to meet their projections not silly console wars expectations.

MS does have deep pockets and can do whatever they want to throw money away. Apparently they don't want to sell the Xbone at $350 during the slower times of the year when they can sell a comparable amount of consoles for $50 more.

But it isn't a comparable amount. PS4 got a 1.1m lead in the "slow months". 

Oh man that's awesome but I said nothing about the PS4.

And they have thrown a lot of money at the x1. There is a limit of how much they can spend. 

Right now they aren't concerned about fighting the PS4, they can't win and make money. They are more concerned about improving they're sales. Price drop has given great momentum that will improve sales throughout the year. Although sales will decrease a lot from January, they will be in better shape going into next holiday where they will be in a better position to take on ps4. Plus they have Halo and they might be able to drop price and not lose money.