True the xbox has lots for your money, unfortunatly its selling like a dog that has rabies so m$ keep having to cut the price to try and shift it, the quality of the software just isnt there and no matter how many titles they pump out for it, it just isnt getting any better, there are some excellent looking titles on the xbox, sadly none of them have decent playability, it's sad but even the supposedly great halo is easily beaten by any number of current pc first person shooters, and has such an amazing lack of veriety in its scenery (only 4 or 5 level texturemaps) that you quickly get bored of seeing what looks ike the same levels over and over again, once you get beyond halo there is absolutle nothing currently on sale that is worth even buying.
The only thing that is selling xboxes is the modchips and the homebrew scene, at least under emulation it is possible to play (with varing degrees of success) playable games from the early arcades and older sega and nintendo consoles.
Its also worth pointing out the HUGE hit that m$ takes on every console it makes current costs are such that whilst nintendo gamecubes cost around $90 to get to retail the other two companies make a loss on each machine sold , sony's ps2 costs them around $180 at retail and microsoft are staring into the abyss with an at retail cost of $343 per unit, dont forget that is what it costs the companies to get a single unit to retail so the retail price includes both distributors profit and retailers profit which also have to be deducted from the retail price to work out the kind of hit these companies are taking (remove approx 25% from retail) so a $150 gamecube has an at retail cost to nintendo of $90 but $150-25% = $112.50 so nintendo make a profit of about $22.50 on each unit sold, now do the math for the xbox
retail price =$199 - 25% = $149, cost at retail to m$ = $343 = M$ losing almost $200 on every console sold, now i realise that companies sell their hardware at a loss then recuop it over time with software sales but if you dont have software worth buying then how are you going to make a profit? m$ have plenty of money but how long will they continue to throw it at the xbox is unclear, it is common knowelege that they plan to bring xbox 2 to market by the end of 2003 which would make the xbox the shortest lived, worse buy console to ever hit the market at any price.
ABCMan
