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The DeanBeat: The Xbox One cost $471 to make. The PS4 costs $381. And why this matters in the long run

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

The battle between the Microsoft  Xbox One and the Sony PlayStation 4 is well under way. Actual sales for the first selling season won’t be announced for a while. And it probably won’t be until next year until we find out which console is really winning the next-generation sales competition.

But thanks to market research firm IHS, we know what each machine costs to manufacture, and that tells us a lot about how this console competition will unfold in years to come. The cost analysis tells us a lot about the choices that the console designers on each side made, and how those will affect the competition for years to come.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.