@Snake
Although Sony is a very large company, over the past several years their operating profits have only (typically) been in the $1 Billion range. When you start talking about several years worth of profit erased in a single year it is not a good sign.
Now, how this is important to gaming really depends on how Sony reacts to this ... Many companies in similar positions in the past have decided to sell divisions of the company to generate capital to offset their operating loss; in the current economic climate the divisions within Sony that would sell for a good price are fairly limited, and if Sony decided to sell game developers (as an example) the only developers that would generate the income they would require would be some of their best developers (that produce games you would want). At the same time, if Sony decided to focus on increasing their ROI they would probably cut back dramatically on the scale of most of their upcomming projects and only produce games with very high sales potential; I could be wrong but I suspect that many of Sony's upcomming games would suffer if their budget was cut in half.
