drkohler said:
Here are just a few points to correct your very strange ideas: A) You just have to believe me. The mere fact that Sony is still producing PS3s is proof that your assumption is completely wrong. This project would have long been killed entirely if your ideas were true. B) So your idea of a board meeting is that old men sit around and say: "hmm. we have to cut costs so let's kill this game and that game".. Whatever the reasons were for canceling these particular games (and if my memory does not fail they were still in early phases of the _whole_ projects), Sony still feeds its 4500 software engineers and none have been sacked as far as I know. So SCE still seems to have the same resources as before. C) Once again, the losses are _far_ from being enourmous for an industry giant like Sony. I have no idea why you think that if gadget A made X amount of money then gadget Y must cost less than X to develop. This is such a weird idea, I really don't know what to say about that. D) This is your biggest and worst assumption. Unfortunately this "the PS2 and PSP make tons of money" mantra is prayed by almost everybody on this site. It does not make it true, however. I can only repeat what I wrote above: None of the Sony consoles are, at this time, at a break-even point as far as production (or even manufacturing) costs go. I would even go as far as predicting that the PSP is, at this time, the loss leader as far as manufacturing is concerned (I'd have to disassemble a PSP3000 and talk with my industry contacts about that though, to be sure). So let's summarize my points of a discussion we obviously will never agree: 1. Sony has to worry about staying profitable - big deal, everyone has to. The economy has unexpectedly increased the worries for _all_ divisions, but SCE might be the division that has to worry the least if people continue to buy consoles and games like there is no tomorrow. 2. _All_ consoles are close to profitability at this time at the manufacuring level. 3. Something went wrong in the 2nd quarter at SCE, a loss of $350m is illogical (unless some creative bookkeeping took place. Obviously a new factor has entered the picture we know nothing about). |
A) That isn't proof that they'll earn back the money invested in it. It's just proof that it's their best way to at least earn back some of that money. As Benga's C points out, they've lost more since PS3 than they ever made with PS2 and PS3 is obviously not the huge success that PS2 was.
C) The losses may not be enormous for Sony, but they certainly are for SCE.
D) "The decrease in operating loss in the current quarter was primarily due to PS3 hardware cost reductions and
increased sales of PS3 software, as well as strong sales of PSP hardware. " So clearly PSP hardware is profitable, and I'd be extremely surprised if PS2 wasn't as well at this point. The mention of "PS3 hardware cost reductions" indicates that it is still being sold at a loss, but I'm not one to blame all of the losses on that. Though I would also be surprised if development of new software is exceeding the earnings generated by sold software across all systems.
