| SpartanFX said: ^^^if bluray picks up yes,,,any format change needs investment and everyone knows that. |
I wonder if ruining one of your top divisions and brandnames as well as losing the amounts of money they have been losing is ever going to repay itself due to BluRay.And you forget that the PS3 development is obviously not the only investment they made for BluRay (not by far). The PS3 was the Trojan horse for BluRay, but the R&D for the format will liekly be in the billions as well.
Besides the fact that losses have to be written of against something the situation is completely different now. Past few years Sony as a company made a profit, which made the losses at SCE a little more acceptable for the shareholders. Now the whole company will likely be in the red, which means something has to be done. If you take a look at the figures you'll see that SCE is one of the worst performers within Sony and if there will be budget cuts (which every company is going through right now) it's highly unlikely SCE will be spared.
A $100 pricecut will mean $1 billion less revenue on 10 million consoles. I don't think SCE and Sony will like this option. This will in all likelyhood be the third year with a loss for SCE, it's hard to see why the company would want to bleed that much money on a division that only provides 13% of Sony's total revenue. That's the thing that's (logically) often missed on a game forum, SCE is not that important to Sony. If they have to make the choice between consumer electronics and gaming they'll choose consumer electronics. I'm not saying at all that SCE will be sold, that's not very likely, but I totally expect them to focus on profitability.
Why on earth do you think they'll do that? It will make SCE look better, but the BluRay division look worse. That's not a very good sign towards your shareholders, if that's the format you've asked your shareholders to invest massively in.
To gain the same revenue for a $100 pricecut you'll have to sell 12 third party games or 4-5 first party games. Eventually that could very well happen on average, but not in the first two years. And money now is worth more than money tomorrow.
