That’s the question Yahoo! Finance is asking, having analysed the success of the console based on purely numerical terms. And it comes to the rather sensationalist conclusion that “Gaming has been a disastrous endeavor for Microsoft, particularly from an investment perspective.”

This conclusion is based on the fact that despite Microsoft sinking quite a staggering amount of money into the console gaming pot – $21m billion is the reported amount – it is still down $5.4 billion in cumulative operational losses. While these are pretty worrying statistics (especially if you have shares in Microsoft), by the author’s own confession this is a purely objective analysis based on past trends. Specifically those that show that trends in Japan dictate the trends in the rest of the world.

Yet both Microsoft and Sony (which could barely put a foot wrong at one time), have struggled to win over gamers in Japan in the latest round of the console wars. Does this mean that both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are doomed to failure as developers see the end looming and jump ship to Nintendo’s Wii or some other, as yet unheard of, console?

It is perhaps possible that the next-gen era will steadily start to see an increasing divide between gaming in the three main territories, the US, Japan and Europe. The unique nature of the gaming industry makes this more plausible, mainly because of the rapid and ongoing growth of the market and the blurring of the lines between home computing and home consoles, which should see a larger install base of consoles in homes in the future.

I guess that is what Microsoft has gambled so heavily on: in a sense its entry to the games console market is also ensuring that Microsoft’s much larger software industry isn’t left undefended against the arrival of competing systems on games consoles that have established themselves in the living room and are taking on more and more of a computing role. 

 

Source : http://www.games-digest.com
>> Discuss This (-1 comments)