Bungie unprofitable? They made a killing on Halo 2. I'd say they did pretty well considering the amount of years nintendo and PS had on them. MS in the next series may be the leader, considering PS is loosing contracts with big game producers.

 

Bungie also made a killing on Myth before they were purchased by MS. I don't know if this shows that MS had a smart plan or just the Bungie has some good game designers.

MS is far from the first company to try selling hardware at a loss in order to make money elsewhere. This is the famous "razor blade" strategy. Give the razors away for free, and make money on selling the blades.

 

MS Gaming division unprofitable.

The Xbox game console is hot, but its division has lost $4 billion in four years

I don't remember Sony having this problem with PS1.

 

I agree

and

I agree

 

They are going to have it alittle harder this time around considering games like final fantasy and resident evil are being released on the xbox. should be interesting to say the least.

Like mike said, they took those loses so they could aquire a share of the market.

 

You can asituate an Xbox vertically or horizontally. You can't include it with the rest of your electronics though because the footprint doesn't match standards. The Xbox could be wider, slimmer, and longer like a DVD player, which is good for a lot of reasons, but has its own drawbacks. I'd rather have a device that fits in with the rest of my electronics if its going to be in my living room.

This is a good example:


I don't really like this computer, but its a computer that is in a box that will work in a tv cabinet and I can stack my reciever on it, etc. Plus, it doesn't look like crap. If MS wants to dominate the living room, you'd think its products might be designed to integrate better with it.

And as for the BBC study, they didn't go anywhere, they just plugged the thing in. There are thousands of zombie computers actively looking to infect Windows computers. Actually visiting malicious sites is just another way to get infected, but its entirely uneccessary to get an infected computer.

 

And lower quality or performance to do so? Weren't you just complaining about the quality? They played the market the exact right way. They saw the whole picture rather than the short term. They are now a major competitor when before they didn't even exist on the market. They might even beat Sony completely out of the market in a few years with this strategy, of course its called capitalism which I know you don't like. You know wal-mart and all.

 

You don't get it. They weren't able to integrate components over time to reduce production costs because they were using parts from competing companies. Sony did reduce costs over time with the PS2.

 

With the FF franchise becoming available on the Xbox, there aren't many reasons left to get a Playstation. MS has done a great job of buying up game houses to get must have titles and creating a programmer-friendly environment for game developers. MS still looses money on each Xbox, but as a long term gamble, its finally paying off. Maybe somday MS will actually make money at something other than its Office suite and OS.

 

Thats because its was a 200mhz computer as opposed to a 700 something.