Economist Says Xbox One is Too Expensive
- Thread starter StewShearerOld
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If that number is remotely true, than an extended Live plan wont'make any difference, so I'm a touch surprised you proposed it as an alternative. If this is the case, the problem becomes one of the market being completely unsustainable, as no console has that kind of attach rate. Even less likely now that consoles tend to be selling to the Modern Brofare crowd who buy a game or two a year. They'd have to REALLY jack Live to account for the numbers they're looking for, and considering this IS the market they're aiming at, that's a bad business model.RhombusHatesYou said:
Well, in my defence, I have no fucking idea how much XBL Gold costs. The concept of paying just to access online gaming is completely alien to me.Zachary Amaranth said:
Also, those numbers were taken from estimates (okay, guesstimates) on the ecksborks 360 and how much MS subsidised it on launch and blah blah blah. Admittedly, the numbers are rough as fuck. Still, assuming the XB1's $499 is the at-cost price rather than a loss... dropping the price by $100 means losing cash on every console sold... and assuming a good 1st year adopt total of 5 million units, that leaves Microsoft with half a billion dollars to scrape up from somewhere. For a single year of sales... And the subsequent 2-4 years (depending on the tech used and how deeply the console is subsidised) the will still be taking a loss on each unit sold. A decresing loss, certainly, but a loss none the less.
The real advantage is that if you can survive the loss period, once your leader product starts selling at cost and then even profitting, all the systems that were put into place to offset the losses become pure fucking gravy. The trick is to survive the loss period but if you're playing the long game and just happen to be a division of a multi-billion dollar software empire that can pad out the hard times meaning you can wear the loss a bit longer so don't have to be as desperate about it then it's a sound plan.
Honestly, I doubt the new gen of consoles from MS and Sony will be sold at much of a loss, if at all. Maybe just enough to make them priced at a nice, reassuring number for advertising like $(x)99. Sony simply can't afford to play the long game at the moment (most of their other divisions are haemorraging money) and as for MS... there's a lot of pressure on MS to just cut loose it's gaming divisions. Trying to play the long game could result in a boardroom coup... or a stockholder putsch... or a... a... fuck it, basically the senior exec management at MS could find themselves in quite a bothersome position. Stockholders want the nice smooth cashflow of MS producing the world's leading office suite, the don't want that dicked around with... hell, Win8 might be something of a turd but it's on almost every new prebuilt PC that doesn't bare the rotten fruit logo which is a completel different story to having to shovel a billion or so into a division that could take years to show any return.
I expect Microsoft are going to monetise the fuck out of all their extra services at some point. Which is going to be a big fucking shock for them if a lot of so-called smart-tv features catch on.
Sometimes I feel sorry for console gamers who just want a console that simply plays games... Remember those? Gaming consoles for games? I tell you, give it a few years with advances in tablets and smart tvs, some smart fuck is going to release a gaming focused tablet that streams to smart tvs over bluetooth, so people can sit around using their tablet as the controller/console and watch the action on the big screen in their prefered couch-slouch gaming environment. Just add some discretely placed buttons and thumbpad sticks (like the PSP ones) on that sucker and... and SOMETHING! Hell, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, out and out PC gamer and enthusiast but I'd want one of those... I'd also need the smart tv but my 'rents have some fuck-off massive 3D smart tv so at least I could entertain myself at their place when I'm not fixing computers or playing with the dog.
Hey, fuck it, let's go real crazy... imagine a set up where you can use a tablet as a screen/controller for games streamed from a PC... or as a controller for a PC game that is also streamed to your big arse smart tv whereever it is in the house. Multiplayer? Fuck yeah, Mr PC becomes the server for everyone using their tablet AND stream all the action onto the big screen.
Man, I totally dig my vision of the future of home entertainment. I hope to see it one day.
True.Aeshi said:
Though I find it funny that I can only afford to buy one or the other, based on my average income. My fantasy when I was a kid of being the adult who says "Heck, give me BOTH systems" isn't as realistic as I imagined, given that launch price for these devices has scaled since the 90's. Even back then, things like the Sega Genesis or the Super Nintendo were pricey by current spending trends (I don't remember what the SNS came out to but I believe Genesis was $210 with tax...). Computers were also expensive and didn't have that impressive games library they do today. I don't think I ever walked into a house in 1995 that had two computers, much less two consoles. Why not? Most could only afford to make a single choice. This trend continued into my teens, where I rarely encountered anybody with a Sony Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo 64 all in the same room, unless it was much later.
Maybe the divide (aka console war) is just the result of business competition: Both sides are selling something you have to plunk down a worthy coin for and they keep one-upping each other and adding more power and more components and more peripherals until finally their R&D budget has flattened and the price for materials is more demanding, so they push their system out the door several prototypes later, hoping for the best. And yea, eventually everything will get ironed out: They'll make a smaller, low-cost model (a slim) with more fans and IGN will give them their coveted "Good Job, You Fixed Your Shit!" award. And then the price will drop. But until then for even the upper-middle class, one system will have to do. My family has to eat, y'know.
On an unrelated note, the Kinect is to the Xbox what the 32X was to the Genesis. Booooo! *shakes fist*
Don't know why it takes an economist to spell out something so obvious. The console is pricing itself out of the console market, just as Sony did with the PS3 and Vita. Too expensive for the market it's aimed for. Parents won't buy it for their kids, teens won't buy it for themselves, about the only people who can buy it are the professionals with disposable income and hardcore gamers.
The tragedy is that an equivalent gaming PC could be had for about that price, though it would involve a little work. The obvious advantage of course would be all the pros that gaming on a PC offers, including emulators, mods, decades of backwards compatibility, fully-fledged media capabilities and so on.
The tragedy is that an equivalent gaming PC could be had for about that price, though it would involve a little work. The obvious advantage of course would be all the pros that gaming on a PC offers, including emulators, mods, decades of backwards compatibility, fully-fledged media capabilities and so on.
A couple of weeks ago I'd have disagreed with you, but since they pulled their 180 it wouldn't surprise me. I never wanted the Kinect when it was an optional extra, so paying for it as part of the basic Xbox one package is not an enticing proposition.RedEyesBlackGamer said:
While I don't particularly care for the Kinect, I get where Microsoft is coming from.
The GameCube had a bunch of peripherals that went underutilized due to not enough people developing for them.
People didn't develop for them because people didn't have them, because people didn't develop for them... I seem to have gone cross-eyed.
If everyone has a Kinect, then developing with it in mind becomes a more viable prospect.
The GameCube had a bunch of peripherals that went underutilized due to not enough people developing for them.
People didn't develop for them because people didn't have them, because people didn't develop for them... I seem to have gone cross-eyed.
If everyone has a Kinect, then developing with it in mind becomes a more viable prospect.