I have a question.

(long post, but i guess you could skip down to the bold part)

Hardware tend to be sold with a loss, right?
Production cost + console price = "X", with "X" often being a negative number the first years or so, right? So the more hardware you sell, the higher the total of production cost is going to be, ergo you're hardware revenue is in the red, right?

So why is "console sold" the main thing among bickering girls in these wars? Why wouldn't you be more interested in profit? Serious question. Why is consoles sold such proof of success, when hardware goes for a loss? Software and overall extras (downloads, add ons, adapters, keyboards.. etc.) is usually the moneymakers and tends to be profitable from day one. So once again, why isnt the War about profit instead of who is loosing more money at first?

Never quite understod that part. Obviously i know that hardware too will start being profitable at a certain point. But at this point, a generation of 3-4 year old (young) consoles where the tide has just about started to turn and consoles barely being profitable, why is it important to know who's sold more hardware rather than which division is more profitable? The later may ofcourse include the profit generated by hardware in the end(might not change anything, but it would make more sense!)

Im not trying to start anything with this post. I truly dont understand this cat fight with consoles sold. It all come down to profit for these companies anyway, because i highly doubt that any of them are thinking "yey we're wining the war", except for when they need to push the market their way with statements that they're doing so much better with sales than their competition. SO.. Why isnt success measured in profit? 

I could imagine that its easier finding numbers when just looking at consoles, and that theres more "fun" ways of working with these numbers when argumenting your cause. Still....

Good question. I think the profit is important in the short term, but the market share is the most important thing in the long term, otherwise the competition will eventually destroy you. Take the Gamecube as an example. It was a profitable machine during the last generation, but Sony almost monopolized the market, to the point that Nintendo needed to change radically its strategy (make a revolution) to survive this generation. Now they have both things, profit and market share. They will probably still be around the next generation.

Besides, history has shown us, that the most succesful the console is, in terms of market share, the bigger library it has. More games and maybe better chances to find those games you find "the best" games. That can make your console "better", at the end. But those were the years when most of the people had one machine only. Now is very common to have two or more current generation consoles.

If you are asking yourself "what is the deal with fanboyism?". Well, tell me about it. I don't get it either.

Do you want to wait months at a time to see profit margins and have very little to debate OR speculate now off easier attainable numbers (hardware and software numbers) and have more dsicussions because of the vagueness of said numbers in who doing better.

Really that is truth of the matter and this is a forum so more discussions are better. So is there really any choice?:

You do know the console war is bullshit right?

^^ then why isn't the Wii getting as much love or more from 3rd party devs?

I think people just like to think they got the more popular console. The more people that own that console, the more games are for it. More games = more fun. That is all that we really care about, as consumers anyway.

Ofcourse dabate is better due to it being a forum and all. But this war isnt debated, its borderline hatred and drawn to such lenghts with charts, diagrams, trend calculations and so forth, off of just what you said, vague numbers. How can you claim success using insufficient numbers?

And you can still debate on technology, better game library, future happenings etc. But this war is about trying to prove to the competition that you are apart of the winning team. I.E the console that sells most. Which is what i dont understand.

 Nice post! Its obviously a good thing to sell consoles and have a large market share.