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Xbox One not selling well, And Sony has 1.3 billion losses.

Started by May 06, 2014 02:50 PM
36 comments, last by warhound 10 years, 4 months ago
Consoles have always sold more games than PC games but now it seems according to Gamespot that the trend has changed.

I wonder if this information changes the target platforms and priorities of game developers, or perhaps it's just a fad.
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That's to be expected. However, Sony will make up that $1.3 billion in license fees, accessory and game sales.

X1 will pick up the slack once MS starts pushing the Home Entertainment features and shared Metro landscape of X1, WP8, and Win8.

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Consoles have always sold more games than PC games but now it seems according to Gamespot that the trend has changed.

I wonder if this information changes the target platforms and priorities of game developers, or perhaps it's just a fad.

There also is nothing really out for XOne yet that people want to play, titanfall was a slight bump in the sales but not a major one. I think watch dogs and destiny later this year might cause some more up take in the console sales.

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So far, yeah, no games for either console. Kind of baffling that even after several generations, the launch for both of them has been so anemic.

XBone just isn't selling. But I believe that $1.3 billion loss number is for all of Sony and not just SCE. Sony is losing lots of money from the regular PC division and are getting out of it. Their losses have been inflated by the cost associated with dumping that division.

XBone is selling fantastically. XBone is outselling the XBox 360 - the sales are very good. However, the console industry is basically a fight for total domination. It doesn't matter if you're doing better than last time - even if you "won" last time - if you aren't top-dog this time around. Otherwise you gradually cede market share as the exclusives go to the dominating console.

XBone is closer to PS4 than the PS3 was to the 360 last generation, and the PS3 and 360 ended up with almost equal sales (~70 million each, vs 100 million Wii sales =P). There is still time for XBone to take the lead and surpass the PS4, if the right exclusives come out. Maybe (ugh) Halo 5 will revitalise sales, or maybe another exclusive. Microsoft has the cash to buy exclusives.

If XBone gets a VR headset out with great game compatibility a year earlier than PS4 gets theirs out, that could give them a significant boost. I'd like to see Microsoft cut a deal with Facebook to use the Oculus Rift directly, instead of making their own, in return for say, better Facebook integration into XBone or something, which would be a win for MS anyway, since they own 1.6% of Facebook.

As for Sony having so high losses... That's entirely to be suspected. Console hardware has usually been a loss-leading to gain market share with the idea of recapturing that money in software sales and licensing fees. That's the battleplan. Except for Nintendo, who usually make a little profit on each console sold.

You can't sell top-of-the-line hardware, assembled together into a console, packaged and marketed (multi-million dollar if not billion dollar marketing), shipped across the ocean, delivered to stores, stores getting a cut of each sale, for only $400 (or even only $500), and expect to make a profit.

What kind of a computer hardware can you buy for $400? A cheap laptop that can't play much in terms of games.

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Worst worldwide recession in the last 100 years ? Japan as Sonys biggest market was badly hurt by the 2009 market dump then the 2011 tsunami and the 3+ year ongoing nuclear meltdown. People wont be poping 400$ for a console and 60$ per game anytime soon. Not to mention they have a electric regulation in place.
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Xbox one is behind Sony by--I think--a million, million-and-a-half units worldwide right now. Obviously they'd like to have the lead, but still, the 5-6 million units sold are far from still-born, and you also have to consider the significant price difference. At first, I really considered it a mistake for MS to price the XBox One at $100 more than the PS4 while mostly focusing on Kinect to make its case. Kinect is neat and all, but it doesn't really appeal to the core-gamer demographic. I think the distinguishing factor, really, is going to prove to be the cloud-processing that's a part of Xbox Live. Sony itself doesn't have the expertise to just design and build that kind of infrastructure any time soon, and will have a hard time funding an acquisition given their current financials (not to mention, no one worth buying is interested in selling).

The low-hanging fruit of the cloud are simple things like dedicated servers for multiplayer, which frees the client to only do the processing it cares about, rather than holding some power in reserve just in case your box has to become the server, and also ensures that the server has a high-bandwidth/low-latency, which should free up such games to have player counts in the kinds of numbers you see in PC games. Titanfall takes it a little bit further by adding AI adversaries that run on the cloud server. It does remain to be seen, but the elastic nature of cloud servers, plus their rate of growth and downward price trend ought to mean that no game suddenly becomes unplayable when the publisher, left to run their own dedicated servers, decides its no longer worth the cost and pulls the plug, as has happened with several PS3 and PC games, and indeed the original Xbox Live. Or imagine collaborative games like Minecraft where you and your friends have several worlds living on the cloud, and when one of you logs in, your world just spins up for you, and goes back to sleep when everyone's logged off--Or, imagine a minecraft-like world that's always running. Persistence will probably feature pretty heavily in Xbox One games, methinks. I'm quite interested to see even more creative uses for the cloud.

Nowadays I don't necessarily think the $500 launch was overpriced, I just think they did a really poor job selling people on the value of the cloud as part of the package.

As for PC gaming, I'm perfectly happy to see an uptrend, but the console economics always win out in the end. PC developers deal with too much variance in the platform, too much tweaking and testing, support and problems. Consoles or other relatively-fixed platforms like iPads et all, will always be the more attractive platform once the user base has matured. Furthermore, while the industry may be pulling in more dollars at the moment, a huge chunk of that is MMO subscriptions, and another huge chunk are freemium titles (dominated by a few players like LoL and World of Tanks) -- So its really driven by business models that haven't really been tapped on the consoles yet. I suspect that these models will expand to the consoles (and if true, XBox and their cloud are better-positioned to take advantage), or if nothing changes, that pay-to-own titles are still doing better on consoles than on the PC several times over.

throw table_exception("(? ???)? ? ???");

Wasn't a big part of Sony's losses because they sold one of their businesses? (I think it was pc's)

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Wasn't a big part of Sony's losses because they sold one of their businesses? (I think it was pc's)

Well they also had to sell their headquaters in central Tokyo building soo ouch all around for Sony.

"Smoke me a kipper i'll be back for breakfast." -- iOS: Science Fiction Quiz

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