Sony Still Losing Money on Each PS3 Sold

[WheelsOfConfusion]

Can they please cut the costs enough to put hardware backwards-compatablity of the PS2 back in? PLEASE? Maybe then people would have more incentive to stop buying the 2 and move to the 3.

 

[rhino13]

I highly agree with this. I bought one of the release day PS3s and couldn't be happier with it, but now if I didn't have one I'd just be waiting for Sony to at least add the level of backwards compatibility that the 360 has.

 

[megamanx00]

Well, they aren't doing too bad considering that someone who buys a PS3 only needs to buy a game and a few blu rays for Sony to make that up. I think it really comes down to both Sonys decision to add blu-ray to the PS3, and the prohibitive fees that the blu-ray consortium insisted on for so long that killed alot of blu-rays momentum. Sure it helped sony with the HD war, but it lost them the counsel war and from a financial perspective it wasn't worth it. By the time blu-ray really begins pulling up the PS3, if people don't ditch it for HD downloads anyway, it will be time for the next generation.

 

[ahmshaegar]

kami3k: You weren't off by that much if you were talking in USD. He was talking in British pounds, and he was more wrong since he used the sign for British pounds then appended dollars at the end anyway =S

 

[Guest]

PS3 = $600.00 paperweight...at least that's true for me and the hundreds/thousands of people who have had their PS3 bricked by a firmware update...go look at the official forums.
SONY charges $160.00 to fix it. No wonder when they're still losing money on each sale.

 

[eklipz330]

ps3 has been selling well in the past few months in japan, and i think it'll continue to do better. if they come out with a slim, im def gonna get it as well as a few exclusives. =]
but a 360 and pc is more than enough for me as of now. got mad friends with 360's

 

[CChick]

It doesnt matter. all you sony haters can enjoy the RRoD all you want ... oh yes you xbox fanboys/girls. dont be jealous.

 

[Zagen30]

[citation][nom]swindled999[/nom]PS3 = $600.00 paperweight...at least that's true for me and the hundreds/thousands of people who have had their PS3 bricked by a firmware update...go look at the official forums. SONY charges $160.00 to fix it. No wonder when they're still losing money on each sale.[/citation]

And the 360 has had hundreds of thousands of consoles die because of shoddy hardware. I do give Microsoft credit for extending RRoD warranties across the board, but they still have way more console failures than Sony does. I'm sorry your PS3 got bricked, and yes the firmware updates should be more thoroughly tested, but you have to admit that PS3 failures are nothing compared to the 360's.

 

[Kami3k]

[citation][nom]ahmshaegar[/nom]kami3k: You weren't off by that much if you were talking in USD. He was talking in British pounds, and he was more wrong since he used the sign for British pounds then appended dollars at the end anyway =S[/citation]

Well I was off by 2 billion, it was one billion that they lost. I got confused about the 3 billion they made last year, or the year before that. But even then, they spent something like 99 billion dollars and only got 3 billion in profits back. Ouch. I was looking at other companies like IBM and they were spending like 15billion to make 5 billion.

Sony has some serious issues right now.

And yes I noticed he used the pound symbol then said dollars at the end, probably just habit though.

 

[maigo]

I might have to buy one before they start making money of them... and then just steal games...

 

[ahmshaegar]

kami3k: All right, I gotcha.

Well, it certainly won't help anyone if Sony exits the console business. Although I'm a cheapskate who buys stuff from a generation back, I'd be sad to see any of the current players leave the business.

It is disheartening to see the level of incompetence from companies these days though.

 

[spectrewind]

[citation][nom]fulle[/nom]In curiosity, I popped on Newegg to see what a PS3 costs nowadays. "Your Price:$389.99" for the 80GB "Core Pack".*makes a face*And apparently Sony's still losing money, huh? Its a good thing that you can't just put a 60 dollar videocard in a cheap Core2 based system and play most of the same games... -wait, you can. Damn this thing sucks![/citation]

It doesn't suck. The venue is different. I have sunk thousands of dollars into custom systems over the years, beginning back in the 3DFX days, and currently run DX10 Nvidia on a C2D box. I am primarily a PC-gamer, have been, probably always will be.
I recently began exploring console gaming again.

While my PC is technically far superior to my launch 60GB PS3 with the emotion engine, sometimes it's worth it to be able to just sit in the living room with a wireless dualshock controller and headset. No fussing with updated device drivers, spontaneous software crashes, poring over Windows event logs, worrying about anti-malware solutions robbing the gaming performance.
My PS3 passes the "grandma" test. I can sit my mother-in-law in front of it and she can set up a movie to play for my kids when my wife and I are away from home. She cannot do the same with my PC.

A couple of random examples in "Clancy" game quality:
In my opinion, Splinter Cell (any version) seems to be better on the PC. I have SC 2,3,4 on both systems. The PC version is better on all of them.
In my opinion, H.A.W.X is better on the PS3 than the PC port of it.

In another example, a game like Crysis would probably not port well to PS3 given the needs of the game design. The same can be said about MGS4 on the PS3 making it to PC. I seem to remember these being platform exclusive titles.

/rant

 

[apache_lives]

bah they loose on the console, they dominate the future market AND make money on each title sold - THE BIGGER PICTURE

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]7amood[/nom]I admire the cell masterpiece sony createdBut they should have taken competitive opponents into considerationA whole study should have been made regarding the simple minded people that thinks the color of some game is better than some other game.By the way... Who thought that wii could ever win the console war??At least sony put some effort into their console rather than creating what may be considered a side kick PC with lots of errors and manufacturing problems.[/citation]

Ha. Nicely put.
I admire the PS3 myself, but it is still a failure on Sony's behalf.
How does it cost them that much to produce?
It's nice to see M$ has been making a profit on the 360 for a lil while now though. At the system costing only $200.
Granted you do get less with the 360 (and I also can't convince myself to buy online time. You want me to pay how much just to play the bloody game online!?).

The Wii however...They have been profiting damned near the start.
Cheap crap hardware, and costs more than a 360... yet it sells faster than EU can throw new lawsuits.
FAILURE!
On the consumers behalf...

However, a ATi 4770 only costs ~$100, and a AMD 5050e costs $60. $50 for a cheap MOBO, and an old HDD laying around. Just use your TV to play on. Costs about the same, for something still better.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Sorry that should have been $1.7 billion, the pound was a typo. I never said that blu-ray is winning the war against DVD, I said it had won the war against HD-DVD. Besides which, blu-ray sales may be slow right now but this is a format to stay, it will live longer than the PS3. Blu-ray player prices will fall and non hd-tv's are getting hard to find. In a few years it'll be the norm to have a blu-ray player instead of a dvd player. For each player and disk sold, Sony will get a small cut. I'm talking long term here, far longer than a year on year basis. The PS3 was, to Sony, all about blu-ray.

 

[my_name_is_earl]

Not to mention Blue Ray movie sales. Those are pretty good sales too.

 

[descendency]

Sony does deserve this though. Their mightier than thou attitude for the years building up to the PS3 (and the blatant lies that ensued) as well as their "if we build it, then developers will be forced to develop for it, because we are Sony" design model basically put them into this mess.

1) The CELL Broadband Engine (CELL chip) is/was a supercomputer chip that was known to be difficult to design for but that isn't the bigger issue. Not only do companies have to spend the extra revenue to design for it, any PS4 will be highly unlikely to have backwards compatibility DUE to the CELL's unique design. So, your PS4 will probably have ZERO BC (unless it tries to use software to emulate PS2/PS3 games). Oh, and if you think they are just going to reuse the CELL, it'd be an interesting move if they want to basically pull a Wii, but if they plan to actually produce a next generation system then they won't use the CELL. The CELL wasn't anything more than a stopgap for the super computer market (which is why IBM was interested in the first place). It's a dead architecture to IBM. They've moved on. What does that tell you?

2) BluRay integration was and still is a problem. No, I'm not concerned with adoption rates, just with the speed at which data is read off the disc. the DVD drive in the x360 is 12x and the BD drive in the PS3 is 2x (yes, they are different x values...). The important thing to know is that Sony's 2x BD drive is just a bit too slow for you to actually stream content live off of the disc to play it without hard-drive installation. Sony knew this and went forward with HDD install to compensate... However the entire thing is a bigger issue than people (Sony Fans) are willing to admit. Had they went with a 12xDVD and a blu-ray add-on (which would have forced the consumer to actually choose blu-ray) the price of the PS3 would be dramatically cheaper.

Two of the three most expensive parts in the PS3 were HIGHLY unnecessary by Sony and it forced developers to develop in a poor way initially (you can't just take your developers and send them to a seminar on how to develop for the PS3 for 6 months and lose all that development time... you will go broke). Now, the engine's, tools, and general knowledge is in place to do development so the game quality has gone up to match.

But Sony's gamble was something Sony just arrogantly pushed through. And they knew it was a risk. They just expected because they produce it and the PS2 base was "100+ million" (which is believed to be a lie by most considering the current number puts US and Japan at around 50 million... which means that they want us to believe that Europe is 70+% of their market... lol) that developers would be forced to develop for the PS3.

I won't even get into MS's shoddy QA (quality assurance) of the x360 since the article is on the PS3, but I'll put it this way: For every ounce of arrogance Sony showed in the PS3, MS showed at least that much incompetence in QA (some of the problems are from poorly mounted heat syncs and poorly soldered chips and electricity "leakage")

 

[descendency]

Oh, and Sony *will* make the money back when the BluRay market expands. Just go back and look at DVD vs VHS. The DVD market was no where near "effective" against the VHS market for a few years. So I guess that means you only own VHSs still? Trust me, if you spent 500+ USD on an HDTV, you will be buying a blu-ray player soon if you haven't and you will be consequently buying BluRay movies, so sony will make the money back in licensing.

If you don't plan to buy an HDTV at some point, feel free to avoid BluRay.

(before you say it, DD is a decent but inferior product. Pricing will be similar because retailers like Walmart will not allow it to be drastically cheaper and since the same people involved with BD would be involved with DD... Sony MGM is responsible for 90% of the good movies produced in the past decade...

There are just a boatload of issues... many of them are from the fiber companies like TWC being ran by idiots and assisted by the government to be monopolies... that will have to be worked out. So, the best short term solution is the little blue box... or pirating [which is not a suggestion... just a statement of fact])

 

[safcmanfr]

[citation][nom]danimal_the_animal[/nom]it IS still a GREAT BD player!!!![/citation]


I can also go out and buy a Bluray player for my PC for $100, along with $90 Graphics card and dirt cheap core 2 duo system. total cost: not much more than the PS3, and I can do more with it. (Media Center, work station, gaming machine.....)

 

[captaincharisma]

I'm surprised Sony hasn't completely tanked on the PS3 with no price cuts and bad marketing. oh well i got mine and not regretting one minute of having it.