Randy-
My comments were soley alluding to the premise that people could be mindlessly chanting "profits are on the way" over and over w/o ever considering that may be they are not.
And why exactly wouldn't they be? I've not seen a single explenation as to why MS isn't on course to turn a profit.
It's what M$ originally stated, it is what they want you to believe, it is their way to put a sort of blinder on their customers in the face of considerable losses over a sustained period of time
Customers? You think I care if MS makes money on the XBox? Why would I? If I was an investor in MS, which I am not, then I would be interested.
It's fine and all if you wish to wholeheartedly believe what M$ feeds out as PR, but who is to say that a little counterpoint every now and again can't be healthy?
I'm waiting to here the explenation why.
Marconelly!
Just as you said - different times, different markets. So why even bother comparing them?
Adjusting for the overall market growth the XBox still comes out ahead, far ahead actually.
Well, if you consider lowering the goals from 6 to 4-4.5 million, and missing even that, to be on track, then OK, they are on track..
I thought we were talking about the business end? Given that they are exceeding the target tie in ratio(of any console ever at comparable life cycle points for that matter) that is the relevant factor.
Magnum-
to be profitable they don't even need gazillions of users, they just need to recover their expenses. seeing how much they spent (and not invest, like someone else pointed), how many games would they have to sell to break even ? how many years of live subscribtion ?
For games they would need to sell about 200Million games to recover their total $2Billion investment in launching the XBox(even advertising is an investment). With their current tie in rate they are around 30Million titles sold, give or take. 1/7th of the way there within a year(and the, by far, slowest year of a typical console life cycle).
total disaster in japan, japanese developpers disaffection ...
despite it launched a month later in europe, it surely sold less than other consoles.(perhaps the sega bundle changed that..)
Looking at the October sales charts we see 58.8% of games revenue from western developers(26.7% Japanese- they only list the top ten publishers). Japanese developers are becoming less and less relevant in the western, larger, markets.
i think we'll see this winter how MS and the others perform.. i'm afraid MS don't have the most appealing software line-up for this christmas season..
The Cube's been kicking the XBox's ass on that end for quite a while now. We can see from the sales charts how much that really matters.
Cybermac-
And why even bother comparing M$ to the market leader whose success was practically guaranteed? Why not compare to Nintendo (which Xbox fanboys do on all other accounts - Sony is clearly aiming too high) who managed to laucnh two gaming platforms, experience decreased software sales and yet still managed to end the year with a record income?
And where is Nintendo now in the sales charts? Sony lost money and kicked ass, Nintendo made money and got its ass kicked. It isn't coincidental. What would have happened if Nintendo took that $900Million and utilized it to secure exclusive rights to GTA through '04, DQ/DW, StarOcean and Madden(@$225Million a pop it would have made it well worth the developers time). What would Nintendo's marketshare look like right now? Nintendo was a giant corporation when MS was a couple of guys slapping code together in a single room. MS's business model has proven over the last two and a half decades to be vastly superior in the long run then the overly conservative approach Nintendo takes. Their refusal to spend the cash to destroy the SNES CDROM drive is what blew them out of the water last generation.
Yes, but with considerably lower profit margins and many more companies that make up the market.
Many more companies? I'm counting three set top console platforms, I can't count all OSs with both hands.
No what they need is stop throwing money after the consumers.
Like Sony does, and like MS does in the other markets it competes in? I suppose when you continue to manage to rack up a ~90% marketshare you might be inclined to think your tactics work. When you go from a ~90% marketshare to less then 20%, I would think you would realize your methods aren't working.
Perhaps in your mind. The Xbox is bad business, the numbers don't lie. However, everyone knows that M$ had to react to the threat that consoles, and in particularly Sony, pose to its business. So as bad business as the Xbox may be it is also neccesarry business.
Perhaps I should just let you argue with yourself over this one. The XBox is a good business model for MS long term, that is what I have been saying all along(and you imply that you agree while arguing the point.....?).
M$ is not stupid but applauding them for what they have achieved in the market is ridiculous.
Applauding them, what do you mean?
