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Procrastinato on 29 December 2009
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Gnizmo said:
Procrastinato said:

The PSP Go wasn't advertised very heavily, to my recollection.

Seriously, think in relative terms, Gnizmo.  Of course the PSP Go cost some money to R&D the new form factor, shrink the chips, etc. Of course it cost some moderate amount of money to make a new box, and advertise it (although it was quite light, in terms of advert dollars, I would think).

In the grander scheme, its risk factor was extremely low.  Its not a new machine at all, and is far cheaper to produce than the 3000, most likely -- or at least the analysts seem to think so, and that'd be in line with every other chipset shrink like... ever.  Given its hardware and especially software revenue potential, I think you'd be hard pressed to call it a "flop", even after the first 100K sales ($25M revenue) -- which I believe it surpassed in week 1. Add a couple retail-free, CoG-free software sales to each of those units, and I think you'd be pretty lucky to find any expert who'd claim the chip-shrinking and minimal adverts cost Sony more than they made back.

 

I am thinking in relative terms. I just understand how much money you have to pay engineers. They do not work for close to peanuts at small firms. A big project for Sony would mean a significantly higher salary than anything I was looking at back in the day. Simply shrinking the CPU (ala 360) would not be a huge issue, and is normal day to day stuff. The redesigned form factor requires some work though. Just trying to make sure the overall design is consumer friendly can give a significant cost. Never mind fiddling with all the internal parts to make sure nothing about the new design will screw the machine up. The new parts are what will increase the R&D.

Motherboards get re-engineered by companies far smaller than Sony all the time.  Heck, I can do it in my garage.  The form factor probably took some creative effort, but I think you'd be surprised at the efficiency of hardware companies at doing just that on a regular basis.  I think you're overestimating the cost here.  I don't think its going to be significant enough to warrant any sort of serious revenue to pay for it.  Designing and testing new chip designs is the real money/timesink.

You're welcome to disagree, of course, but I think its a pretty bold statement to claim that a hardware device which sells at a hefty profit, like the Wii, can't pay for its minor, like the Wii, R&D expenses, even if its only sold a half million, or even just a couple hundred thousand, units to retail.  Sony practically didn't advertise it at all, either, and I'll bet that's because they weren't willing to risk extra money on a device they knew was overpriced by retailers.