Sony Has Lost More on the PS3 Than it Made on PS2

[Spankey]

steven787 said:

Rainbird said:

steven787 said:
If they are losing $260 or $200 (3b/15m) per console no game or games is going to turn that into a profit.

Do we know how much profit Sony gets averagely pr. game sold?

Could be fun to know, just how big the attachratio had to be for Sony to break even xD

 

$260 is hardware loss, $200 is total loss for the division divided by the number of consoles sold. So that would be included already.

Sony probably profits an average of 5-10 per disc sold that would be an attach rate of 20 games per console on the high end of that profit per game, 40 on the low end. (It's really hard to figure avg/disc because most of the cost is in development. But 35 is the number that usually gets tossed around for revenue.)

Where Sony has a chance to profit is in the long term affects of PS3, in ten years 50%+ discs and disc players sold will be bluray. Sony sacrificed one division to win a format war. They aren't stupid, they knew that PS3 couldn't possibly have been profitable losing 200+ per piece of hardware. They were actually counting on losing more, because they thought they would sell more PS3's. Time will tell if it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Good points

the higher margin on PSN downloads might shrink the number of games needed to turn a profit too

Also, Home might be able to attract some money through sales of advertising space and sales of HD/music downloads. If it's ever released, of course! (j/k)