As a Brand xbox hasn’t been profitable for Microsoft, IIRC. OR did it just start being profitable? Not sure.
Nope, still not making them money. They live off of their enterprise tools division.
Consoles are about the Loooooong game. They want people invested in the infrastructure that is Microsoft. And with the xbone it’s about getting into your living room and setting up shop in order to sell you digital content -whether that be games or movies or TV shows or whatever.
Microsoft’s “Entertainment and Devices Division” (which includes Xbox and Windows Phone) is currently operating at a profit for the last two years. I don’t feel dedicated enough to dig back through previous years, but IIRC, they’ve been making money on the Xbox for awhile now.
wait…what are you talking about? What big-time console game? What “titles they previously worked on”? Do you know anything about this game at all?
You’re right, I’m not familiar with Skulls of the Shogun’s situation at all. But from your general description, it sounded very similar to Team Meat’s and Phil Fish’s gripes with Microsoft. Both seemed unprepared for the rigors involved with working with a major publishing partner and have decided that this is Microsoft’s fault.
But reading the article, that sounds like exactly what happened. So again, meh.
This must be recent, post January, unless Forbes was lying… and even so, it doesn’t mean the BRAND is making money. I’m pretty sure they are still in the hole that subsidization and support for the Xbox and 360 have dug for them.
In the meantime both went on to make MORE money on the PC without anywhere near the hassle they dealt with on the Xbox.
I know you desperately need for the consoles to be perfect at everything, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar, liar pants on fire. But let’s get real here.
Even the big corporations behind these machines that you seem to worship so much are clealry stating that they were handling things in the wrong way, and that now, with new machines on the way, they are attempting to rectify the situation.
Where the hell did that come from? Are you really that mad about my opinion that I’m not interested in hearing complaints from PC developers who make the jump to console development and find it hard?
This is a ridiculous misrepresentation. They did not find “console development” hard at all. They found things like GETTING PAID BY MICROSOFT to be hard.
Why is THAT hard to understand?
Perhaps your fanboying is bugging people? You just admitted that you weren’t even familiar with the game in question, yet you were shittalking everything involved in it. You were completely unconcerned with informing yourself on the topic, but just kept saying crap anyways. In other words, you were fanboying, and that is extremely annoying.
Pretty much every indie developer has talked about how hard it is to work with Microsoft. All the gaming magazines talk about it. They also talk about how Microsoft has messed up. These are the professionals in the field. You can bury your head in the sand and claim that everyone who says anything contrary to your opinion is just whining or stupid or whatever, but it doesn’t change what happened.
I could understand the strange adamancy (and often viciousness) into which every game console discussion seems to descend if all the participants were young teenagers, because it could easily be ascribed to unrelieved sexual frustration. But we’re all adults here, so it can’t… actually, now that I think about it…
Not for nothing, but the users of this board have gotten into multiple heated debates over how you hang your toilet paper and whether its OK for an adult to drink milk. I would hope the inner-workings of a multibillion dollar industry are as interesting.
Exactly; nothing surprising there. Plenty of companies actually make their money elsewhere in their operations outside of retail.
For example, the big oil companies make more money in oil trading and refining than they do in retail gasoline sales.
Hell, even Microsoft has always sold Windows well under what the market would have borne, just so they could dominate the market and provide a big incentive to go with Office and the other products they make.
FWIW, Adam Hartung is a bit of a twit; his mantra seems to be that companies should be chasing every flashy technological innovation that comes down the pipe, instead of being prudent.
For example, his argument that Tribune’s acquisition of local TV stations is bad because of streaming video is kind of crazy; true things are moving that direction, but there’s still a lot of life left in both broadcast and cable/satellite TV, and streaming video isn’t going to kill both of those dead anytime soon.
Hi Vinyl Turnip!
You must be new here.
Maybe him and Michael Pachter should get together and really fling some shit that’ll send the Internet into a frothing rage.