They seem to go back and forth on whether they're loss leaders subsidized by more expensive games and captive paid online services or mediocre hardware sold at a premium to their captive audience. Last gen was AFAIK the loss leader phase (and the one before that was outdated, dogshit hardware sold at a premium from the start), so now we're on to the squeezing their audience for as much as they can phase, and in another 5 years they'll do another loss leader console, and so on.
The old assumption that consoles are cheaper is getting less and less tenable because the corpos need line to go up.
They seem to go back and forth on whether they're loss leaders subsidized by more expensive games and captive paid online services or mediocre hardware sold at a premium to their captive audience. Last gen was AFAIK the loss leader phase (and the one before that was outdated, dogshit hardware sold at a premium from the start), so now we're on to the squeezing their audience for as much as they can phase, and in another 5 years they'll do another loss leader console, and so on.