It's probably worth pointing out that calculating the amount of "loss" on a console is a bit more complex than simply the component cost. It has a lot to do with accounting actually. Since companies tend to look at their financials based on Fiscal Years, there is a lot of costs that get burdened in launch years that reduce pretty quickly as volumes go up.
So for instance, if you're ramping up to produce 15m consoles/year you're going to be buying a lot of tooling, parts, and paying a lot of employees which is divided by a small number of consoles sold. And also, chip yields improve pretty rapidly so your costs for the first run of components is significantly higher.
This is why you sometimes get two different data points that appear to be in conflict, but really aren't.
Launch consoles are VERY expensive in those first few months. But by the middle of the next year, and into the following holiday, prices come down drastically even though it was exactly the same console being made.
It's sort of a pedantic point. But in reality the pricing of launch consoles is a yield/production calculation, so most manufacturers are going to take a blended 12 month view (or 18 month to get through the 2nd holiday) which tends to smooth things out. Then you are simply asking if your overall business (Games + Accessories + Subscriptions) makes more money than you console loss. If so, you're OK. Then the second question is - how quickly does the console get to $0 loss or very close.
Where things get tricky is since cost reductions and cost amortization is based on volumes - when you don't hit those volumes things start to go awry pretty fast.
. Can't imagine Mark Cerny's face if he's ever made aware of this.
