I'm aware it's EDD, it's just to highlight the FY those products were available and making/losing money.

Yes, I believe a certain amount of respect must be shown when royalty finally abdicates the crown (nice of them to time it around the time of the wedding)

Shouldn't we look into these graphs a bit more in depth? For some reason some people are just looking at it and forgeting about other products the company offer.

Nintendo had the GBA during the years of GC, which was a huge money maker and the DS launched in late 04. DS lite was around in the Wii era, so its not home consoles making that money, its Nintendo. Hats of to them, but it does get annoying when people say the Game cube made more money than the PS2, cause it obviously didn't. I could never gauge how much the PSP was costing/making Sony though.

I know we're using this graph as a guideline, but since SCE was merged with the mobile phone and PC division, its hard to track profits properly. Nintendo is the only company we can do this reliably. Microsoft's EDD includes the Zune, and PC games (Mac office suite too strangely) sales as well. Don't think those are big players, but they could make a difference.

Anyway rant over. Hats off to Nintendo and Microsoft for generating cash. Sucks that Sony had a few bad years, but least they're seeing some inflow now =D. Gaming is healthy atm, which is what I like to see. Well atm its the first year with all 3 up lol.

The one thing we do know from the Microsoft model this gen is Sony will definitely be charging for PSN next gen.  Xbox Live is the biggest reason they've managed to make this turn around.

So after next quarter it looks like MS will finally turn a profit on the 360 as a whole (which they probably already did when you count in Zune and the phone epic fail costs). Now lets see if MS can keep the 360 long enough around to destroy the original xbox losses. That would be in the words of Borat: "Great Success!".

Go MS!

Wow just noticed the 2.7 million 360 units sold in the first quarter... that's pretty damn impressive! Only 2010 fared better at 2.8 million in Q3! (excluding the holiday quarter of course) This may be the 360's best year in sales if they can maintain a strong 4th quarter this year.

Some things to consider.

For the PS2 there is overlap, so how much more would losses be since the ps3 came out if the ps2 wasn't still there selling? then there is whatever ps1 overlap at the start and psp overlap.

Nintendo still had the GBA with the gamecube.

360 is only just covering it's own losses now, although at the rate it's going it's very possible those profits will pass the devision the ps2 was in.

But then how could profits also be so low when the ps2 sold over 1.5 billion games or more than 50% more than any other system ever has.

I wonder how much exchange rates hurt them as well.

or just pushing psn plus more, but yeah the online has been huge for Microsoft while iirc psn was still running at a loss. 

Exchange rates hurt SONY alot, also every SONY console/handheld has made a big loss in its first year on the market, most break even on the second and profit on the third - combine this with low profit margins when hardware is profitable and alot of software sold after its gone platnuim(greatest hits for yanks) and you get an idea of why SONY 'only' pulled in around $1 billion pre-PS3 losses. 

 Overall i think the biggest message to console manufactuers would be "Don't launch consoles at a loss, minimize R&D costs on products that won't see the light of day and keep up with currency exchange rates". This also leads me to believe that next-gen atleast from a hardware perspective we might see a healthier industry - afterall just as Microsoft moves into black for lifetime 360 profit Nintendo will be gearing up to launch N6, and SONY is always going to be in the red on PS3 (if they are lucky it might fall to about $1 bln which is a good recovery). 

 Next we just need the software side to become helthier (we need better management of additional revenue streams like DLC and more titles that are mildly successful instead of games being massive hits or failures).

How did Sony not make any more money selling 150m consoles!!!! But at least they are making some money now, though the Japan issues won't have helped (something like 150,000 PS3s destroyed as well as many other less direct impacts)