either Sony loses much money or MS makes much money, help me out.

[DirtyP2002]

mrstickball said:
Sony most likely subsidizes the Online service as a way to get more Playstation gamers online, in hopes that they purchase the more expensive Sony-driven software such as GT5P, Warhawk, Siren, and PS1 titles, whereas Microsofts' offerings are far smaller and cheaper (however has far more content).

I'd say that Sony most likely loses a little bit of money on the service (not a ton), and Microsoft makes quite a bit off of it. However, we don't know how much Microsoft actually makes off Gold - Many players use discounted retail membership cards that are lower than $40 USD, which makes me think that Microsoft does not sell the cards for an insane amount to retailers, but makes quite a bit off direct-credit purchases off of XBL itself for memberships.

If I were to estimate, I'd say Sony is losing around $50-100m a year, and Microsoft is making around $250m a year from XBL between downloads and gold passes. Expect it to jump when Netflix integrates their service with Microsofts'

 

 According to NPD XBL point cards and gold membership cards took up 3 of the top 10 spots among the top-selling accessories. 

http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=1967 read it here.

 

and I still do not think qore is a great money-maker. It is just offered in the US, there are 5.8 million PS3s sold, let's assume 3 million PS3s are online in the US (calculating with the same rate of the Xbox360) and let's assume every second american online PS3 using qore (which would be very very good), and let's assume all of the qore-users do have a full year subscription (which is very very good again) that would be 37,5 million USD. That is not that huge, isn't it? Okay it is something, but not ground-breaking. I really want to know how much MS and Sony are spending on their online services. But if sony is profitable with the PSN, MS must make lots of money.