Just be ready for Xbox and Sony to stop subsidizing their console prices then. That may be the future anyways as Xbox (and Sony really recently) push towards cross-plat gaming.

Well Nintendo has been able to outsell both of them combined without subsidization, so it shouldn't be too big of a problem.

That may be true in terms of number of devices sold, but it's definitely not true in terms of revenue. In the seven years since the launch of the Switch, Nintendo has made almost $60 billion in revenue, or $8.5 billion per year. The Playstation and Xbox platforms make $12-16 billion a year.

I care about their revenues about as much as I care about the consistency of squirrel droppings. They can all take a haircut and still be eminently sustainable, even quite profitable, as Nintendo has amply demonstrated.

Umm, ok. I'm just saying that the parent comment is incorrect. Loss leader consoles make more money.

Also "Console manufacturers can endure being forced to sell products at cost." is a different argument than "Console manufacturers are more successful when they sell products at cost.", which is what I was addressing.

Game consoles, notably excepting Nintendo, usually sell at a small loss, break even, or a small profit to begin with, and eventually make that up not in game sales, but in selling a cheaper to build console later in its lifecycle. If a PS5 cost Sony $450 to build in year 1 and they charged $500, that's rather small profit compared to game sales where they rake it in. But if you look at that same PS5 sold in year 2 when the lines are all moving at full speed there should be some profits. If you look in the 3rd or 5th or 7th year, it's gonna be a whole lot cheaper to build and these later profits should more than cover earlier losses.

And the cool thing for MS and Sony is that the consoles sell well through their entire lifetimes only tapering off strongly in the last year or so as anticipation for the next generation hits. So, where profits may be minor, none, or negative in the first year or two of sales, the next 5 or 6 years turns game consoles into profitable businesses before any game sales are accounted for.

(There are typically about four Moor's Law cycles per console rev so how could costs not come down dramatically. Heck, each time the leaders move to a new node, the old one drops pricing by 10-20% and there are probably 5-6 generational leaps during a console lifetime. If the PS4 APU was $175 in year one, it could have been down to $115 at the midpoint of the console's lifecycle and down to perhaps $30-$40 by the last year or two of production. This is also reflected in memory price drops as well, though perhaps not to the same degree and as a smaller fraction of the total but one could imagine that PS4 that originally cost $400 to build and sold for $400 would be down to under $250 to build with a lifetime profit margin of about 15-20%. Not App Store 30% free money but not the loss leader most seem to think they are.)

Of course, Nintendo is the outlier and they're reasonably profitable on the console from day one, consistently.