SCE: No reduction in the games staff

[NJ5]

Groucho said:

Blu-Ray drive royalties are $30 per drive. For reference, there were ~250 million DVD drives produced last year. Sony gets about 30% of the Blu-Ray royalty, as I recall. If BD drives become the standard in PCs, thats 7.5 billion USD in royalties each year, of which near 2.5 billion goes to Sony.

DVD disc royalties were about 0.075 USD per, until a few years back, where they dropped to about 0.04 USD per. I dunno what the BD royalties are, but they are probably relatively close to that. I dunno what worldwide DVD numbers are, per year, but I would wager that they are definately in the billions, and maybe in the 10s of billions. You could probably look it up at the various regional movie associations' web sites.

Blu-Ray is already approaching 10% marketshare, and growing.  We're talking billions of USD per year in royalties, here, in the very near future. (cue Carl Sagan)

Interesting. The $30 royalty per PC drive seems correct according to google. That's a lot but I imagine they'll have to lower it before these drives become common. I can't find anything for the 30% Sony portion though.

As for the discs, that doesn't seem like a lot of money compared to the drives (400-800 discs per drive at those levels).

Btw here's an interesting link about DVD royalties I just found:

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=23926