NJ5 said:
The gaming division will probably only be profitable this year if the yen weakens AND they don't make price cuts. If your revenue drops 10-20% when you weren't even making a profit yet, it's pretty hard to get profitable in the short term. Not to mention that PS3's increase in software sales is at least partly countered by PS2's and PSP's decrease. PS3 hardware cost reductions should help a lot, but IMO probably not enough to counter those factors. All will be clearer when the next financial report comes.
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Well, first party releases make Sony far more money per title than third party stuff. LittleBigPlanet is selling at a nice pace (it's tracking well above any of Sony's Holiday 2007 releases, for example), and Killzone 2 will probably be Sony's best selling first party title since GT4 (though it may not break MotorStorm's numbers, but MotorStorm was probably Sony's most heavily bundled game...ever). This should help in offsetting the decrease in ps2 software numbers.
If GT5 hits next year, it'll be a very good year for SCEWWS.
Also, PSP's software fluctuates weekly compared to the previous year, but overall it's doing better than last year (compare January 9th's worldwide software sales to January 11th's last year), thanks mostly due to the PSP's resurgance in Japan. Over the holidays, some weeks it was 1-200k below last year's numbers, and some weeks (Dissidia's release week) it was above last years numbers.
Of course, hardware costs are still the big question here. I agree with the bolded part of your post 100%.
