Do you think Sony will ever make a net profit from the PS3?

[NJ5]

Bodhesatva said:

 

I am taking that into account. Both Sony and Microsoft have to pay for servers, so that's a wash. What I'm saying is: Microsoft and Sony make (and spend) money in the exact same ways in regards to the internet; both have servers they need to pay for, both make money through DLC, both provide demoes to push software. There is exactly one financial thing that XBL does than PSN does not, and that is cost 4 dollars a month to simply exist.

So if we're going to strike 40 million dollars off of Microsoft, we need to strike 40 million off of Sony, too.

Well, if we want to get that specific it should be said that Microsoft probably needs more servers than Sony, for two reasons:

1- Larger userbase

2- MS hosts the servers for every single 360 game, unlike Sony which leaves it to third parties to host their own servers for their games. I may be wrong on this but I think it's correct.

However, Microsoft has quite a lot of experience in servers, and they can likely use datacenters more efficiently since they have servers for many things other than gaming. If I had to guess, I'd say that Xbox Live should have a quite good profit margin.

Of course, it'd be too hard to do a proper analysis of this without more knowledge of Sony and MS's operations, so let's just say that Microsoft surely makes more money from their online offerings than Sony does, and that this gap will surely get larger as the PS3/360 userbases get larger as you said in another post.