From what we know, Xbox One cost about $396 to make last year. DDR3 prices have had an impactful increase in price, no die shrinks, no cost saving revisions.

I think it's save to say Xbox One is being sold at a loss.

Seems like it would be easy to buy 2 of those bundles and sell one of them separately for some profit.

It depends on how much you can get the controllers to sell for.

Just an example.
XB1+ Wolfenstein ~ $300
2 controllers $100

Already made $50. Too bad I do not have disposable income like that.

Heavy Rain had a budget of $22 million, another $8 million for marketing, and andother $10 for distribution, for a total of $40 million.

The game sold around 3 million, and generated $100 million for Sony.

Now those weren't all $60 copies, so it's impossible to judge how much Sony made off each copy, but generally retail gets a 20% cut, and the console owner gets 11.5% (which in this case is Sony so it's irrelevant), so the only thing we have to subrtact from the $60 of each copy is the $12 for retailer.

So even if we assume that The Order was a $50 million investment for Sony, it should be well a pretty profitable venture even at 1.5 million units sold.

It's wrong when you start your reasoning for price for ram with street prices - MS and Sony didn't and don't buy ram (and other parts) off the shelves. The cost estimation is most likely wrong and we don't know by how much the manufacturing got cheaper until now.

Funny how certain people are starting to show up.....lol! Just having a little fun. Take it easy.

You are wrong to make those assumption. DDR3 is legacy tchnology. Legacy technology costs more to manufacture because those who manufacture it have to justify the oppertunity cost for not creating the more profitable/new technology. 

There is a reasons Microsoft is currently rummored to be looking into building a DDR4 system...hint, it's not because DDR3 prices are cheap. Both will cost a pretty penny.

Hmpf... Well, let's start by saying that GDDR5 is in fact DDR3-memory. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR5

So both are equally "legacy".

Another point is both 360 and PS3 don't even use off-the-shelf ram. 360 uses "legacy" gddr3 ram while PS3 uses XDR ram which was never available for customers as their wasn't a product to buy with it. Only because MS happens to use DDR3 this time tells us nothing about prices, actually. I know it is easy to compare and to use it for reasoning, of course, because everybody can check "numbers" but in this case it is just not valid.

DDR3 and GDDR5 are incredibly different. GDDR5 is not considerred legacy technology.

I'm sorry, but you lost this one. Next your going to tell us that the new DDR4 is legacy to because it's also based on DDR3 or the same reason.  At least you make me laugh. Cartman will be Cartman.

Fact of the matter is we can't know the costs definitively to know whether the ACU bundle or this value bundle are making or losing money for MS. But we do know MS has been traditionally willing to sell their hardware at a loss in order to get sales. And there is every reason to suspect that they are doing the same here, because their experiment with trying to sell at a profit or break even didn't work.

The Order is sticking to the top 20 longer than I expected. I also see that the value bundle is only temporarily out of stock. Looks like it's Wolfenstein they are short on, because the game's page says "In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process." for Xb one but just simple "In Stock" for all other skus.

This is not about losing or winning, but to be correct in what either one is saying. You are not but you judge posts different than I do. I see that even providing links does not have an effect in any way so we can stop this discussion as it is completely off-topic now.

And don't be sorry where it's not needed