Squilliam said:
DM235 said:
I think Sony only got a small percentage of those sales, as it's Square Enix that own FF7.
And PSN cards are a money losing operation. If a retailer sells you a card for $20, that means Sony would have sold it to the retailer for less than $20 (no retailer would go to the trouble of receiving, unpacking, handling and selling something for free). The only real benefit to Sony would be that they get your money before you actually buy something, so they get to earn interest on it. With today's low rates, I do not know if this would cover the retailer's portion (unless you kept a card for a long time before using it).
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Actually they are highly profitable. I read somewhere that only 4/5 Xbox Live cards sold are ever redeemed. They get the money either way so the equation chages to $16 * 5 = $80 = $80 redeemed times 0.3 = $24 profit.
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If you are assuming that Sony gets $16 per $20 card, then selling 5 cards gets them $80. If only 4 out of every 5 are redeemed, then 4 * $20 = $80 is redeemed, which means they break even compared to direct sales.
Do people really lose that many cards?
And I guess there is another benefit. You do get more PSN store purchases from people who do not have credit cards...