The guardian "analyst" has not based those figures on anything BUT speculation, like "this much profit COULD come from this unit, so it means the rest must be doing like this". What a crappy analyst!

I would have thought The Guardian is something more reliable. They are actually worse than the fan boys trolling around here.

I can probably find it. I read it like a month or two ago...

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9874317-1.html

Ah, I guess "they aren't being agressive about collecting them." In otherwords they are only collecting some of the royalties for it... or it might not be at all.... can't tell it's kind a vague statement.

I'll err on the side of saying i was wrong.

Another interesting thing to note from the article that pertains to this however is...

"The royalties will be split among several players, said Doherty.

Blu-ray has a lot of grandfathers. A lot of people call it a Sony standard but by our estimates Sony doesn't even have 30 percent of the IP," Doherty said. The top four intellectual property holders are likely Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Warner."

Even so royalty collection is a great buisness.

It's a good article if you've got the time to read it.

Toshiba should sell HD-DVD technology to China.

They'd get back some of their money. 

These findings reduce the chances of a PS3 price cut in 2008.

PS3 is selling well and sales will increase when more exclusive games are released this year- no need for a price cut in 2008.  I have read that in August a cheaper PS3 chip will be available which will reduce manufacturing costs and will result in PS3 per unit being profitale. 

I'm sorry , I won't even bother going into anyalysis . Loosing (260*10,000=$260,000) for every 10,000 PS3's sold sounds highly illogical to me ,I dought most businesses would have the lack of brains to allow such a situation except for larger companies like microsoft with the cash-flow to do such a thing.

The financial result includes the 60 GB European launch, the later 40 GB units were cheaper to produce.

Costs don't only include production costs: retailer share, local taxes, local support / localizations, local PSN servers, marketing, promotional deals, etc.

Only huge companies like Sony and Microsoft with alternative income are in the position to sell products at a big loss for a long period of time, investing in the long term outlook of the product line and company.

I can practically tell you for a FACT that they are not losing anywhere near that figure.

It was said that Sony was losing about $300 per PS3 at launch, that was 18 months ago. The price for most computer hardware drops in half over this long of a time. Add to that that the cell is now 65nm instead of 90nm which further reduces costs.

Also a couple months ago, Sony said that they had reached the breakeven point on the PS3's price

 Well Sony ain't what you'd call a small company either...

 And people, do consider that the PS3 has a big chunck of its sales in the US, so the $ going down only increases loss per PS3 because of lowered revenues.

In any case, if you consider the cost of other Blue Ray players, there is definitely a hudge cost of opportunity...

Yeah well, that's nice and all but that doesn't change the fact that Sony's gaming division lost a lot of money during Q4 in the passing fiscal year. So for those who say that PS3 is definitely on the verge of being profitable, you better take a second guess, those losses must have come from somewhere, and R&D doesn't cut it, not during this time of the year.

@ mztazmz

The iSupply report only stated PS3 Components costed $850 around launch. If correct you still have to build the console and add a lot of additional marketing, R&D, support, retailer share, etc, costs.

That's why the PS3 is really an amazing deal for consumers in terms of provided technology / retail price ratio. It's really a console build for the future. If they were produced and sold as fast as the Nintendo Wii it would have put Sony in danger as a company, IMO that's an important reason why it's good that the most anticipated PS2 sequels haven't hit early within the PS3's lifecycle and Sony experimented mainly with introducing new franchises until the costs ratios are more favourable. This also provides more time to adapt legacy game engines for the new technology.

Some components drop in cost quickly, however other components drop in cost slowly.