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Next-Gen Shift Costing Sony and Microsoft
The shift to the next generation of consoles is costing their parent corporations dearly. GameDailyBiz has an article up claiming that the gaming division at Sony may lose almost $900 million this year, thanks to rollout costs for the PS3. The 360, already in the marketplace, is looking pretty solid. However, in among increased Microsoft revenue announcements (up 13% for the quarter over last year) and a healthy number of shipped systems by the end of June (almost 5.5 million) is a hard statistic. From the Gamastura article: "As for specifics on the Xbox 360 and Xbox's financials, the company's Home and Entertainment division, which includes the Microsoft Xbox video game console system, PC games, the Home Products Division, and TV platform products for the interactive television industry, lost $388 million for the quarter on $1.06 billion in revenue, a sharp increase from the $175 million loss the previous year." A reminder that these systems may be successful, but they're costing to get out there.
And if they manage to pull off a console victory with a name like Wii, it'll be nothing short of stunning.
On the day of release, I'll be going to the mall for a Wii, then I'll spend the next few days eating, drinking and Wii'ing. When I'm familiar with it, I'll share my Wii with my friends, maybe take my Wii round to theirs and we can play with each other's Wii. Then when it's old and everyone's got one, I'll put my Wii on eBay and sell it for a small fortune.
I mean what's next - is the Wii 2 gonna be called a Poo? Come and play with my Poo... Not since Free Willy has there been a culture feck up of such laughable proportions...
Bull. The first console EVER to sell on a loss was the Xbox, that's why the Saturn cost so much; Sega sold at a profit. And it's on record that when Sega lowered the price from $400 to $300, they PAYED the stores the price difference to make up for it (e.g. Store buys console to sell for $400, then Sega says, 'Sell at $300'. Store would normally lose $100, but Sega gave the stores $100 to make up for it.)
The Saturn was the first console that was actively being marketed and the company was losing money. While Sony was building the PlayStation from parts they made themselves, Sega was paying a higher price and buying parts from others.
While that made some of the difference (the video output IC on the Saturn is from Sony!), it's not the majority. The problem was that the Saturn had too many custom parts, almost everything besides the CPUs, RAM, and CD drive was custom, like the TWO video processors and the funny bus to handle four different CPUs (main, slave, sound, CD-Rom (Yes, CD-Rom, it's part of the Saturn's security system)) and other things like MPEG card overlay, controllers, and cartridge port. The Saturn arch. was a hairy monster. The PlayStation was almost entirely made from off the shelf parts. The PlayStation was streamlined. While the PSX was not as powerful as the Saturn (wait, let me finish) it was so much less complicated (and had a much better inital SDK) that it was easier/humanly possible to get good preformance out of it.
With the Saturn, you had two main processors with poor communication to work with, a poor SDK (the first one didn't even natively support light-sourcing!), a DSP for the main CPUs (there was also a seperate sound DSP) you had to program (Well, not had too; most games just let it sit there doing nothing. It was intended for things like calculating projection), a really screwed up and complex video processors; a lot of time is wasted formatting polygon data into the various tables and display lists for the polygon/sprite generator, and funny memory partitioning for video RAM (512kB for texture/sprites and display lists/shading tables/palletes, 512kB for the background processor, and two sets of 256kB for frame buffers. 1.5mB total. The PSX had 1mB in one partition for video RAM). But if you want to see the Saturn out-do the PlayStation, go compare the Saturn and PlayStation versions of Dead or Alive (Saturn has higher resolution, more polygons, better textures and backgrounds). The one of the creators reasons for the Saturn got DOA first that he wanted to put it on the more powerful system of the two. Today, DOA's creator continues to choose the more powerful console, which is, at the moment, the Xbox 360. (Another reason for the Saturn getting DOA first was that the arcade version ran on Sega's Model 2 hardware.) Or you can look at the Saturn Shenmue video which runs on a stock, RAM-upgrade-less Saturn. (To give a timeframe for it, the Saturn version was probably shelved in late 1997 or early 1998, as Dreamcast version footage was around when the Dreamcast was released in Japan in late 1998.)
The Dreamcast was a money losing venture for Sega. Sega went for broke in building the best console they could buy with the Dreamcast, and sold them at less than cost. A lot less than cost. The theory being that scale of economics would catch up to let them rebuild their once glorious market share and, that the margins on their own games would be good enough to justify a loss.
Ahem. The first console EVER to sell on a loss was the Xbox.
This little piggy is in the market, (Microsoft)
this little piggy has yet to come, (Sony)
this little piggy only had some things, (N-Gage)
this little piggy had none, (Phantom)
and this little piggy when "Wii Wii Wii" all the way to the bank! (Nintendo)
Okay, so I need to work on my rhyming.