So you were put in charge of making the 060 based amiga

[orb85750]

I would have licenced the Draco and be done with it ....

Draco was great for its purpose (video), but it's not a full-blown Amiga.

[orb85750]

It [Draco] may have lacked a commodore chipset, but the fact is, AAA was so far from being finished that by the time it would have been ready it would have been hopelessly out of date. Draco, using off the shelf components for graphics and sound really was the only realistic way of doing things if Amiga was to stay in any way relevant past 1995.

It was more of an Amiga than anything I've seen since C='s fall with the exception of the Minimig.

Draco was very nice, but what could it do that my *older* A3000/040/VlabMotion/Toccata/Firecracker system couldn't do?  Are you saying that Commodore should have released a souped-up A3000 in 1996, as KThunder states above?

[orb85750]

If you're playing that game, why bother with the A4000? Hell why bother with the A3000 when the A2000 was capable of everything that your system was.



No I'm saying C= should have dumped developing their own chipsets and gone over fully to RTG using Draco as the starting point.

Keeping Amiga tied to slow, expensive, underperforming chipsets (as they were by the time of AGA) was only ever going to end badly.

(But recall what year the A4000 was released.)  Easy enough, even Commodore could have released a Draco-like machine significantly earlier than 1996.

[orb85750]

If it was to survive it had to go modular. It had to dump its games console roots.

And how long to stick with our beloved 68K series CPU?

[orb85750]

All consoles are sold at a loss, even initially when they are very expensive (e.g., playstation3, Xbox360, Wii).  Devs want to be the first with the most, so they tend to pay through the nose for licensing fees.

Wait, how are you doing your accounting?  Sold at a loss after including all marketing expenses? or sold at a loss even before marketing $$ are taken into account?  You are not talking about the bare bones cost of manufacturing, right?

[orb85750]

Yup, post _manufacture_ and before marketing. Nintendo are the only exception having always sold their hardware at a profit. Even though the GameCube sold less than the Xbox and PS2 they still made more money from it than either competitor.

This is very well known stuff with consoles I'm surprised it still surprises people! They sell the hardware at a loss as they make all of the money from peripherals and gated development.

We cannot buy hardware direct from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo without being able to demonstrate that we're at least in talks with a publisher, have previously released games OR have developers onboard who have previously released games. It can be a real pain for a startup just getting dev' kits.

Then you pay tens of thousands of dollar to submit your game to them for TCR/TRC testing, which will usually fail the first time so you'll re-submit until it passes. You do this for each territory that you release in, eg: EU/US/Asia and for each console. Once you've passed all of this you send your gold master to them to duplicate and they send you the discs which you pay for of course then when you sell it, they get slice of the profit.

If you think that's profit-tastico you should see how much they make on the peripherals!

Andy

Where are you getting the manufacturing costs of the various systems to assert that all, except Nintendo, cost more to make at the Chinese factory than the (wholesale) selling price?

[orb85750]

Excerpt from above link:

"Selling a console at a loss is typical for Sony and Xbox house Microsoft. Console makers sell hardware below costs to establish an initial install base, then make money back after a time when economies of scale make hardware profitability possible."

The implication is that the console sales generally do become profitable in the long term, even without the hugely profitable software, so long as sales volume reaches expectations.

[orb85750]

Besides which by the time console hardware finally becomes profitable it's in the end-stage of it's life and so selling a much smaller volume of units. If you've sold 10 million units at a $20 dollar loss, but at the end you manage to sell 1 million units at $20 profit, you still made a $180 million loss overall.

In general, that's not quite how economy of scale works.  A company might sell X units at a loss, then later negotiate 5X that volume at lower manufacturing cost per unit to make a profit on every unit for that larger volume.  I'm sure there are some exceptions.  Nonetheless, it is clear to all that the console sales are not where the major profit rests.