Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.
Less of an issue with Valve. They don’t have as much of a need for a hardware loss leader since they earn from Steam regardless of which hardware it’s running on.
If they structure their supplier contracts anything like the auto industry does, that would only be because they are on the back end of the product’s production lifecycle.
I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.
Yeah I’ve got a ps5 and psvr2. I did spend a little money near the start of having the VR on a couple games I bought through their online store, but have since given Sony $0. No psplus subscription (or even much temptation to get one; I have no idea what it even gives you and don’t really care either way), no new game purchases, though I have given EB games some money for used games.
Not sure how typical of a user I am (eg someone else did buy all of those used games new at some point), but loss leading would have just been giving me cheap hardware for no other benefit to them.
It shifted into “fuck you no more money” when I broke one of the VR controllers and found out that there was no way to get a new one without buying a full VR set and getting it serviced involved sending the whole VR set to them. Ended up fixing it myself but the thing left a bad taste in my mouth. So greedy, wasteful, and/or lazy.
Also, by virtue of the fact that the Deck and Steam Machine are de-facto PCs, if they made those products loss-leaders, they would get bought up to use for non-gaming purposes and reduce availability for their intended audience. The same thing happened to the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.
Less of an issue with Valve. They don’t have as much of a need for a hardware loss leader since they earn from Steam regardless of which hardware it’s running on.
As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.
If they structure their supplier contracts anything like the auto industry does, that would only be because they are on the back end of the product’s production lifecycle.
I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.
Yeah I’ve got a ps5 and psvr2. I did spend a little money near the start of having the VR on a couple games I bought through their online store, but have since given Sony $0. No psplus subscription (or even much temptation to get one; I have no idea what it even gives you and don’t really care either way), no new game purchases, though I have given EB games some money for used games.
Not sure how typical of a user I am (eg someone else did buy all of those used games new at some point), but loss leading would have just been giving me cheap hardware for no other benefit to them.
It shifted into “fuck you no more money” when I broke one of the VR controllers and found out that there was no way to get a new one without buying a full VR set and getting it serviced involved sending the whole VR set to them. Ended up fixing it myself but the thing left a bad taste in my mouth. So greedy, wasteful, and/or lazy.
Well, yeah, were a decade into the generation. If you’re still manufacturing a console at a loss 10 years after release you fucked up huge somewhere
Also, by virtue of the fact that the Deck and Steam Machine are de-facto PCs, if they made those products loss-leaders, they would get bought up to use for non-gaming purposes and reduce availability for their intended audience. The same thing happened to the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster