Phil Spencer confirms; cost of production unknown
Far more systems than you might imagine have been sold with no initial profit margin, or even at a loss. And if you saw Microsoft’s E3 Presentation, you might guess where this is going. Most of those systems had exclusives that made you willing to buy the system and games in the first place; that’s how they recouped the losses. The Xbox One X, on the other hand…
In a Business Insider interview, Phil Spencer confirmed that Microsoft is making nothing from the console itself. Considering that the console costs $500 dollars, on the high end for video game consoles, that’s probably not a great thing.
When the best things you show off for your marginal 4k upgrade are Minecraft, a Dragon Ball game, an MMO which will be impossible to play with randos no matter what, and a non-exclusive Bioware title, you’re not going to see much movement for your console.
At least PS4 Pro offers you something. Even at $500, you still need a 4k television set to justify it, and most people don’t own one. At the cheapest, I’ve found one for $279. Realistically, there’s no way you get out of the store with a 4k TV and an Xbox One X for less than a thousand dollars. Because if you cheap out on the TV, you’re probably going to be buying another soon enough.
Did we learn nothing from the PS3? They actually had exclusive games at launch for their $599 system, and it still took them several years to start breaking even. Almost everything shown in Microsoft’s presentation will run on the vanilla Xbox One, or worse, PC. I have no idea what they’re thinking. But whatever they’re thinking, it’s not the same as what everyone else is thinking about them.
~And they tried to sell us a car!~
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