Some quarters they make a lot of money, other quarters they lose a lot of money; net is pretty near zero over the whole console life-cycle.

Had they not wasted so much money and worked on an open platform, they would have steady profits almost the entire time.

(2) Seems to be the theme of the last two generations.

Not only that, but that is roughly 2000$ of license fees (~$10/game + 50$/yr * 10 years + "tons of peripherals and crap" which I'll conservatively say is $500) that you did not need to pay if you didn't game on a console.

And once your consoles break and are out of support... all that money has nothing to run on.

Not only is it not profitable for Microsoft and Sony... but customers, like you, who overpaid for disposable content.

The ironic part is that an X86 instruction hasn't been mapped to dedicated hardware for decades. It just signals a series of micro-ops to perform the calculation.

That started back when we were still doing most of our applications in assembly... and people were begging Intel for the most arbitrary of operations in-silicon.

Then of course when we switched to compilers only about 10% of those operations were used 90% of the time... which is why ARM got so efficient and cheap... because they built their committee around that Turing-complete small set of instructions that compilers would most likely use... rather than Intel's obfuscation to make assembly programmers not want to light themselves up in a gas fire.

So I guess... sort of a bad example?