Microsoft Posts Huge Xbox Losses
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BenSkywalker
Regular
Thanks Almasy, did any of those sell more then a million units world wide? I'm having a hard time relating those to expanding the gamer base by tens of millions.
Let's go back to your original statementBenSkywalker said:
Unless you consider the Cell architecture to be radically different from EE's I'll have to stick with my observation Sony is done looking for a radical new chip and is getting ready to go into production.
How does it make sense to compare month to month figures from launch when PS2 was only available in one territory for the first 8 months and suffered from shortages so severe it was selling at online acutions for double its retail value 5 months after the US launch? Going by the same measure (auction sales) there was no lack of either xbox or GC a week after they launched, let alone a period of months.
Okay, you bend over backwards to paint a rosy picture for MS and its future in the consoles biz but prefer the more fruity looking games. So what?
BTW, ever been accused of being a PS2 fan? Didn't think so
archie4oz said:
hey, it would have helped it get more attention though.
BenSkywalker said:
I do not remember any of them selling in the million units range. Although I honestly do not know how much those titles expand the market in reality, I do think they help by diversifying(sp?) the lineup and attracting gamers looking for something different. They are also very appreciatted by several hardcore gaming groups.
Heretic
Or maybe he likes games like Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 0, Metroid Prime, Rogue Leader ect?.. oh how fruity looking
BTW I never quite understood the connection some people seem to see between cartoon style graphics (which I assume is what your refering to) and being fruity?
I don't think Ben is an XBox fan, but I do think he likes MS as a company.
Ben
You mentioned console hardware losses as far as the $2 billion set aside fpr XBox losses. But what about the massive advertising cost that help sell all those consoles? What about the cost of the free games they give away? What about the cost of buying companies like Rare?
Those costs have probably already reached $1 billion even without hardware losses.
BTW, when MS bought Rare, was that the entertainment division or what? As in would the cost of Rare have shown up for that division or did MS hide it elsewhere?
Or maybe he likes games like Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 0, Metroid Prime, Rogue Leader ect?.. oh how fruity looking
BTW I never quite understood the connection some people seem to see between cartoon style graphics (which I assume is what your refering to) and being fruity?
I don't think Ben is an XBox fan, but I do think he likes MS as a company.
Ben
You mentioned console hardware losses as far as the $2 billion set aside fpr XBox losses. But what about the massive advertising cost that help sell all those consoles? What about the cost of the free games they give away? What about the cost of buying companies like Rare?
Those costs have probably already reached $1 billion even without hardware losses.
BTW, when MS bought Rare, was that the entertainment division or what? As in would the cost of Rare have shown up for that division or did MS hide it elsewhere?
BenSkywalker
Regular
Heretic-
How would anyone not? One has a single CPU core with a couple of vector units and a miniscule amount of cache. The other has dozens of CPU cores, likely dozens of vector units and multiple MBs of cache. One of them is a MIPS core, from the same company that powered the PSX and N64, with some modifications, the other is an entirely new architecture from Big Blue unlike anything that's hit the market before. How can you not see them as major departures from each other? The most die hard supporter of Sony's direction along with the most vocal detractor on these boards both agree without a doubt that there new direction is radically different from the EE.
Which system had a simulataneous global launch, I must have missed that one. As far as retail availability of the PS2, not a single store in my area was sold out after five months on the market. By mid January of '01 every store in my area had full stock of PS2s and I don't recall seeing anyone complaining about availability after the holiday rush.
How is it bending over backwards to use the XBox's detractors own numbers and MS's numbers from a year ago and simply do the math to give people what the numbers mean? Your fruity comment comes of as very, GAish. Misinformed at best.
Most of the people on this board haven't accused me of being a fan of any console. I've had die hard Cubites calling me an XBot and vice versa. Those that simply read what I'm saying combined with looking at why I am saying it can figure out pretty easily that I don't really care what light I cast a particular platform in.
Almasy-
Darren-
I don't like the REs, and you know Jeff Gordon's car paint scheme does tend to look a bit like fruit. I should really stick to the more masculine PS2 titles I have in the house like Jak&Daxter and Kingdom Hearts. You can't understand how childish Mantorok really is until you have faced Ursula
I would assume that the losses would all be filed under the home entertainment division. PC games are included, so odds are there really isn't anywhere else to 'hide' the Rare acquisition.
We have the loss reports in terms of total from the HE division, that would certainly include PR/advertising.
How would anyone not? One has a single CPU core with a couple of vector units and a miniscule amount of cache. The other has dozens of CPU cores, likely dozens of vector units and multiple MBs of cache. One of them is a MIPS core, from the same company that powered the PSX and N64, with some modifications, the other is an entirely new architecture from Big Blue unlike anything that's hit the market before. How can you not see them as major departures from each other? The most die hard supporter of Sony's direction along with the most vocal detractor on these boards both agree without a doubt that there new direction is radically different from the EE.
Which system had a simulataneous global launch, I must have missed that one. As far as retail availability of the PS2, not a single store in my area was sold out after five months on the market. By mid January of '01 every store in my area had full stock of PS2s and I don't recall seeing anyone complaining about availability after the holiday rush.
How is it bending over backwards to use the XBox's detractors own numbers and MS's numbers from a year ago and simply do the math to give people what the numbers mean? Your fruity comment comes of as very, GAish. Misinformed at best.
Most of the people on this board haven't accused me of being a fan of any console. I've had die hard Cubites calling me an XBot and vice versa. Those that simply read what I'm saying combined with looking at why I am saying it can figure out pretty easily that I don't really care what light I cast a particular platform in.
Almasy-
Darren-
Or maybe he likes games like Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 0, Metroid Prime, Rogue Leader ect?.. oh how fruity looking
I don't like the REs, and you know Jeff Gordon's car paint scheme does tend to look a bit like fruit. I should really stick to the more masculine PS2 titles I have in the house like Jak&Daxter and Kingdom Hearts. You can't understand how childish Mantorok really is until you have faced Ursula
I would assume that the losses would all be filed under the home entertainment division. PC games are included, so odds are there really isn't anywhere else to 'hide' the Rare acquisition.
We have the loss reports in terms of total from the HE division, that would certainly include PR/advertising.
Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's quotes like the following:BenSkywalker said:
Regardless of how different anyone here thinks the two architectures are, I still have to contend your notion that Sony is still "looking" for the architecture of PS3 at this stage is absurd. A poor choice of words? Why even bring it up? Oh that's right, something about how the money MS is bleeding away now will pay off next gen.
Perhaps you missed the point using month to month figures from launchs would be skewed considerably when PS2 took 9 months to reach all three major markets while xbox took 4 months to reach the same markets.
"I don't recall"- hey, ya know Ronald Reagan was quite fond of using that line as well. Do you live in the UK by any chance? Never mind. If I thought the use of anecdotal evidence from an anonymous source meant anything I would have offered my own. Which is why I pointed to online auctions as a decent indicator of at least some truth to the widely reported ‘supposed' shortage. Would the fact PS2 was still posting great sales numbers in the US at the original retail price two years after launch mean anything to you? Probably not...
Your using close to a thousand words to do simple math with numbers that by everyones account are sketchy at best is what I call bending over backwards. And then tell us it all just means everything is going as MS planned it out a year ago? Could you be anymore of an MS beeatch?
Okay, the fruity remark was just to get your goat and was childish on my part. Same goes for the MS beeatch line. Did it work? I'm not familiar with the term GAish so it's hard to tell. Anyway, could be a result of my being somewhat childish by nature but I find fruity looking games don't bother me at all. Is that a problem?
Yeah I know, but at the time you weren't using them. You were counting up how many XBox's MS could sell without losing more then $2 billion. Which is fine, as long as you include more then just the hardware costs. Like the costs of buying Bungie and Rare, advertising ect.
Also about the loss reports of the entertainment division. Would the entertiainment division have made a profit without XBox? Not saying it would have, just something I wondered.
Heretic
Just out of interest what exactly do you mean by fruity? I know what it means where I live, but what do you mean by it?
marconelly!
Veteran
Well, for what it's worth I don't think they are radically different in their ideology. Cell sounds like a natural expansion of EE parallel computing concept, and I suspect the majority of vertex processing will again be taking place there (on the Cell), instead of the graphics chip.
BenSkywalker
Regular
Heretic
Your quoting the Inquirer as a source for technical comparisons as evidence? Look to the numerous threads here about the particulars of the PS3 design where you can find comments from a wide range of people on the subject.
Flipping your angle around a bit here. Is Cell built yet? Have they finalized clock rate, the 'GPU' they will be using, RAM amount, mem bus, and clock speed of the RAM yet? If not, they are stilling looking to finalize the design.
The PS2 launced in Japan in March, US in October and Europe in November. The XBox launched in the US in November, March in Europe. Not quite the rift you are implying not that it would matter. MS was able to fill a higher percentage of orders from initial launch then Sony was. The European PS2 launch was pushed back a month due to their production issues. Dealing with a launch is part of the console business, MS using off the shelf parts obviously helped them out considerably, but that was part of the decission making process. As far as being skewed, it is a straight up comparison between the initial launch numbers, the same comparison that has always been used in discussion about numbers to date here, I don't recal anyone else complaining about it before.
You are using anecdotal evidence of your memory on what the market situation was of the particular time. These console boards were around at the time in question and we do tend to focus quite a bit on sales and supply issues and in ~mid Q1 '01 Sony themselves even claimed they were able to keep up with demand at that point.
And that goes directly to the point of MS dropping their price being related to their current loss ratio. I have explicitly brought that up already in this discussion.
In case you didn't catch it, I'm using the XBox's detractors and analysts numbers, not mine nor claims from XBox supporters.
Notice you are the only one questioning that point? Teasy isn't what you would call a flaming MS fanboy, MS stated $2Billion in losses roughly a year ago, numerous people remember this very clearly and it was discussed at some length.
Gaming Age-ish. Did it bother me? Amusing more like it, should avoid them when trying to partake in reasonable discussion however, it makes you come off as not being impartial in the discussion.
Darren-
I broke it down by the full HE losses also in my first lengthy post in this topic.
I don't know if they are tied in to the $100 loss per console or not. I didn't comment on it one way or the other as I am not sure. Advertising for the XBox is largely done revolving around particular games which are usually largely covered by the publisher of the title and are counted under software costs. I know there is plenty of XBox specific advertising also, but it is likely less then 1/3 of the total XBox related PR.
Halo has hit ~$150Million in gross sales on a global basis, I think the Bungie cost has likely been covered. For Rare we will have to see how it works out.
IIRC they lost ~$80Million the year prior same quarter as the XBox launch, though I may not be recalling that properly.
Your quoting the Inquirer as a source for technical comparisons as evidence? Look to the numerous threads here about the particulars of the PS3 design where you can find comments from a wide range of people on the subject.
Flipping your angle around a bit here. Is Cell built yet? Have they finalized clock rate, the 'GPU' they will be using, RAM amount, mem bus, and clock speed of the RAM yet? If not, they are stilling looking to finalize the design.
The PS2 launced in Japan in March, US in October and Europe in November. The XBox launched in the US in November, March in Europe. Not quite the rift you are implying not that it would matter. MS was able to fill a higher percentage of orders from initial launch then Sony was. The European PS2 launch was pushed back a month due to their production issues. Dealing with a launch is part of the console business, MS using off the shelf parts obviously helped them out considerably, but that was part of the decission making process. As far as being skewed, it is a straight up comparison between the initial launch numbers, the same comparison that has always been used in discussion about numbers to date here, I don't recal anyone else complaining about it before.
You are using anecdotal evidence of your memory on what the market situation was of the particular time. These console boards were around at the time in question and we do tend to focus quite a bit on sales and supply issues and in ~mid Q1 '01 Sony themselves even claimed they were able to keep up with demand at that point.
And that goes directly to the point of MS dropping their price being related to their current loss ratio. I have explicitly brought that up already in this discussion.
In case you didn't catch it, I'm using the XBox's detractors and analysts numbers, not mine nor claims from XBox supporters.
Notice you are the only one questioning that point? Teasy isn't what you would call a flaming MS fanboy, MS stated $2Billion in losses roughly a year ago, numerous people remember this very clearly and it was discussed at some length.
Gaming Age-ish. Did it bother me? Amusing more like it, should avoid them when trying to partake in reasonable discussion however, it makes you come off as not being impartial in the discussion.
Darren-
I broke it down by the full HE losses also in my first lengthy post in this topic.
I don't know if they are tied in to the $100 loss per console or not. I didn't comment on it one way or the other as I am not sure. Advertising for the XBox is largely done revolving around particular games which are usually largely covered by the publisher of the title and are counted under software costs. I know there is plenty of XBox specific advertising also, but it is likely less then 1/3 of the total XBox related PR.
Halo has hit ~$150Million in gross sales on a global basis, I think the Bungie cost has likely been covered. For Rare we will have to see how it works out.
IIRC they lost ~$80Million the year prior same quarter as the XBox launch, though I may not be recalling that properly.
BenSkywalker:
> so odds are there really isn't anywhere else to 'hide' the Rare
> acquisition.
If that was true there's no good reason why they weren't profitable this quarter. However, we'll know for sure when the annual report comes out as it will contain last year's Q4 numbers for the business solutions segment (remember that M$ changed the business segments at the beginning of the current fiscal year so we don't have those numbers yet). A $1,45 billion investment (Navision) should be rather easy to spot when the highest revenue reported for the segment for a single quarter is $139 million.
> We have the loss reports in terms of total from the HE division, that
> would certainly include PR/advertising.
Yes but how much. In their financial reports M$ operates with a 9th segment that doesn't actually correspond to any specific business. It's called reconciling amounts and basically accounts for expenses that can't be attributed to any specific segment. It's not purely administrative costs as other expenses such as R&D and marketing figure into the losses reported for this segment.
> IIRC they lost ~$80Million the year prior same quarter as the XBox
> launch
$68 million.
> so odds are there really isn't anywhere else to 'hide' the Rare
> acquisition.
If that was true there's no good reason why they weren't profitable this quarter. However, we'll know for sure when the annual report comes out as it will contain last year's Q4 numbers for the business solutions segment (remember that M$ changed the business segments at the beginning of the current fiscal year so we don't have those numbers yet). A $1,45 billion investment (Navision) should be rather easy to spot when the highest revenue reported for the segment for a single quarter is $139 million.
> We have the loss reports in terms of total from the HE division, that
> would certainly include PR/advertising.
Yes but how much. In their financial reports M$ operates with a 9th segment that doesn't actually correspond to any specific business. It's called reconciling amounts and basically accounts for expenses that can't be attributed to any specific segment. It's not purely administrative costs as other expenses such as R&D and marketing figure into the losses reported for this segment.
> IIRC they lost ~$80Million the year prior same quarter as the XBox
> launch
$68 million.
marconelly!
Veteran
Ben:
Seriously, though, what is your beef with Gaming Age? I don't know if you think this board is more 1337 or something, but misinformation, trolling and stupidness here, sometimes easily exceeds anything I've seen on GA lately.
Another question - 8 milion Xboxes sold is for 12 months or 15 months?
marconelly! said:
There has been an influx of people within the last year that has really.. um.. modified the dynamic of this board. To be quite frank, yes, this board historically has been "elite" among open 'net communities in that it's population is highly educated in a multitude of topics and have the ability to dynamically address and discuss a problem in intricate and often interdisciplinary ways. B3D has been the birthplace of many discussions and ideas which would eventually influence the PC IHVs, granted with the demise of 3dfx the level of "professional" interaction here is not as noticeable, it still harbors many industry members.
For you to compare Beyond3D to GA (Which I occasionally read) is in-itself a fallacy and not exactly how all of us have seen B3D. In fact, I question if the influx of.. "modifiers" isn't due to the awareness of B3D being raised in general, but more specifically the references I've seen at GA.
Perhaps similar in that they are both machines which use concurrency to side-step production limitations, but I don't see much more after that.
Where the Vertex Processing takes place is a non-issue in what Ben's talking about. In fact, when designing a closed console like this, with parts tailored specifically for this function, where the processing is done isn't a problem. "Vertex Processing" was moved by the IHV's on-chip because Intel, et al. were becoming a limiting factor in the goal of the 3D IHVs and not moving it would stagnant their parts at that time.
One thing that’s emerging as transistor budgets increase is that the programmability of solutions are increasing - the idiosyncrasy of discrete units such as Vertex or Fragment Processing are quickly dissolving. By DX10/11 we should see this on the PC front, with the transition being complete by the Next Generation Consoles. So, to say that the presence or not of 'front-end' processing is somehow making the architecture more or less Emotion Engine-ish is pretty ungrounded.
The ideologies between the Emotion Engine and what we know of the Broadband Engine or Cell [Gotta' love the marketing terms] seem pretty isolated to me. Perhaps you can make the case that Cell is more the praxis of massively parallel computing to the theory as seen in the EE - but thats pretty iffy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see the Emotion Engine as more the embodiment of Diefendorff's dynamic computing ideal where you have tiny caches, low locality of reference, and are basically playing a fast-paced game of Hot Potato with your data once it leaves it's external storage.
Cell, IMHO, from what we've seen thus far appears to be an almost polar opposite. As Ben stated, you have a high degree of locality with your data as, in theory, you could have everything on-board in a large pool of eDRAM. From there it's routed to these APUs where they dwell in their own cache and are operated on. Beyond the parallel issue, I see little commonality - and that argument ends abruptly when you realize that EVERY architecture that deals with modern 3D graphics is nothing but a massive parallel computer - that’s how you do RT 3D, by doing all your ops in parallel.
Having said that, I'd just like to state that I feel nVidia will surpass the PS3 in the tasks historically (heh, looking forward is hard) considered raster functions. I think PS3's ace will be the flexibility and it's potential for intricate and advanced lighting/illumination that it gives to developers.
Alrighty, it's already 7 and I'm still sitting here... <opens Google>... <search: "obsession"> Chronic lateness kills, damn 'net.
marconelly!
Veteran
OK, thanks for your thoughts and clarifications. I guess time will tell what Cell exactly will turn out to be, what Intel/Amd + Nvidia/Ati will come up with, and how simillar or not those solutions will be. Somehow, I still feel that Cell (or whatever they described in that supposed PS3 patent) is closer to EE, but once they actually unveil it completely, that may prove entirely wrong.
As for GA, I consider a lot of people who post there very witty, intelligent and resourceful. They may lack the technical knowledge of people who habitate on B3D, but I don't think that makes them inferior. Just my opinion...
As for GA, I consider a lot of people who post there very witty, intelligent and resourceful. They may lack the technical knowledge of people who habitate on B3D, but I don't think that makes them inferior. Just my opinion...
G
Guest
Guest
GA rocks!
The average GAers know more about gaming than the average B3Ders.
Sorry Mods, just clarifying a few things, not trying to start a forums war.
The average GAers know more about gaming than the average B3Ders.
Sorry Mods, just clarifying a few things, not trying to start a forums war.
randycat99
Veteran
Well, there goes GA's rep.
