In Patrick Pascal’s blog post, The decline of the consoles, he discusses the decreasing profits generated by video game consoles, mainly Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.

Taken from: http://media.industrygamers.com/news/5018/ai_140.jpg

One thing that I would like to argue with  is his statement,  “The revenue from gaming companies is not dependent on the sales of the consoles itself, but is more dependent on services (like x-box live) and the sales of games and accessories.” While this does hold merit as Microsoft does make a large number of its revenue from offering add-ons such as Xbox live I wouldn’t consider its main form of income. I feel the reason Patrick has come to this conclusion is that the recent income from consoles has been declining. In actuality console companies do make substantial amounts from the physical sale of the console, but come in spurts. On release, a new game system will skyrocket revenue. It has been five years to this day since the PS3 came out and just under five years since any new gaming console has been released. When new consoles are released by the three big powers (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony) they become the main source of income.