Surely you have a console at home, whether portable or not. But what you probably didn’t know is the manufacturing price and how much they ended up selling it to you.
Every brand has a marketing strategy. Some are looking to sell many consoles at low prices and earn with you in the future, and others are looking to get a return on the sale and that’s it.
If you want to know if the purchase was good or not, keep reading, we are going to see the most popular ones.
Manufacturing costs.
Here we will analyze what the main manufacturing costs are so that you can then deduce why the profits are higher or lower depending on the brand and model.
A console that has a screen (Nintendo Switch) is not the same as one that doesn’t (PlayStation). This is one of the points that increases the manufacturing cost the most, especially if it is of good quality and tactile.
Another of the values that make the difference is advertising and its general marketing. On the one hand, consoles like Xbox, Playstation or any of Nintendo have a high cost at this stage, as they seek the massive sale with a low profit margin to then win with all the long-term loyal customers. However, the typical Aliexpress replica with 100 games included for $30 doesn’t have this downside, it focuses on quick, ad-free sales at a much lower price, that’s its whole appeal.
Other things to consider are internal updates or later releases. They require a lot of monthly investment and support expenditure to be able to sustain themselves and serve their users. A computer, for example, does not have this need (except the operating system).
How much does each brand earn?
We will briefly review the main companies and their costs/benefits.
PlayStation
A Playstation 4 would have a total manufacturing cost of approximately $381 against the $430 that a Play 5 would cost. We would therefore be talking about very fair profits for the brand because of its selling price very little above this data.
Xbox
The Xbox One would cost around $470 while Microsoft’s latest model, the Xbox Series X, would cost nearly $500. This gives us very interesting data, since we can observe how the models of this brand have negligible or even negative advantages during the initial sale of the product.
nintendo
This company is characterized by the portable console, with its star at the moment the Nintendo Switch. But how much does it cost to produce? Well, it’s estimated to be around $257, another outrageous counting what it costs to buy it. Its margins, like those analyzed above, are very low.
And a PC?
Here things are already changing a lot as we mentioned at the beginning. A PC does not need that advertising or that support that a brand like the previous ones gives us. A computer is based on parts that can come from different companies and models that we can build to our liking and then no longer have more profit than the sale, therefore setting up a computer will always have a different profit margin. The sum of all the components can cost us $1000, however, the individual production cost for each part would be much lower, that’s where they make a profit.
What is more profitable to buy?
Given the above, the choice is now up to you. A console will always be a great buy since they sell them to us practically at cost. On the other hand, a computer is a bad investment if we only want it to play exclusively (always speaking of power and features similar to the consoles we compare it to, including keyboard, monitor and everything you need to play that these already come with).
Eventually, big companies have very small margins due to competition and therefore our choice must be based on taste and not on the search for profitability on our part.
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