That's reasonable when the PS4 is here and PS3 and PS Vita are at the end of it's life cycle.
Yes, that's why I used them as analogies.
But it's not reasonable when MS stopped reporting Xbone shipments in it's 2nd year of it's life cycle.
Unfortunately, you typically don't get to decide when a product’s life cycle will end, nor is there any guarantee about how long that will last. While it’s not what you’d expect/hope for a console, if Bone sales peaked 13 months after it launched, then that’s that, and it’s unlikely to re-peak once it does. People will likely continue to spend less and less money overall to buy in to Bone, and you can guess at the rate of decline based on how long it took for them to peak. If a console typically peaks in its third or fourth holiday and Bone peaked in its second, it’s not likely to live as long as a typical console might.
Yes, they sold more units, and that’s good, but when someone wants to know why you earned less money, pointing out that you did more work in the process doesn’t really strengthen your case. Making your product more attractive by lowering the price should attract
more of the dollars being spent, not less. Sony lowered their buy-in price by 12.5%, and had limited stock at 25% off, and their unit sales increased more than 30%, increasing their overall revenue. That’s how you’d
expect a console to be performing in its third holiday, but it seems Bone already peaked last year, at least in terms of dollars-attracted, and units-sold will certainly peak not long after.
Why MS still producing Xbone when it's not a point of focus for the company anyway? Just for more XBL numbers probably.
For the same reasons Sony continue to produce the PS3. First, if there are still people willing to pay you for it, there’s no reason to refuse their money. More to the point though, it’s about maintaining brand loyalty.
Like I said, the idea is to transition your customers from your old product to your new product, and, “Fuck you, now you’ll buy our new thing,” doesn’t typically engender a lot of good will. Better to continue supporting your legacy product until it dies a natural death.
Sony support the PS3 because the hope is those users will be satisfied with their experience, predisposing them to buy the PS4 when they’re looking to upgrade their experience, whenever that may be. Similarly, MS continue to support the Bone in the hopes that those customers can be transitioned to
their new offerings, but rather than the comparatively simple transition of, “The same, but better,” that Sony ask of their users, MS are faced with the considerably more difficult task of turning console gamers in to mobile and/or PC gamers. They’ll lose a sizable fraction of those console users in the process, but Windows — and hopefully mobile — dwarfs anything they’ve ever done in the console space, so the real concern for them is that the general public continues to think, “XBox means games,” rather than, “XBox will fuck you over as soon as it's more convenient to do so.” Even if they lose 90% of their console users, they don't want them saying anything worse than, "It's good; it's just not for me," to everyone else.
Certainly not, "If you're gonna game on PC, support Steam and Linux, because MS are just here to rob you."
Ceasing to report unit sales doesn't necessarily mean they've put it down. It just indicates to their shareholders that it's been put out to pasture. "No extraordinary measures," etc. MS have told their shareholders they aren't focused on growing or even necessarily sustaining their console business, but it still has use for them, as a source of consumer goodwill. That's what Nadella explained when he took over;
XBox has value to MS, but he conspicuously said nothing about
consoles having value to them. On the contrary, he explicitly said the brand was worth keeping
for their other products.
