| ChronotriggerJM said: Well with Sony's rate of downsizing cost on hardware, I'm not sure if they were losing money for very long :/ but as far as R&D and such I can see your point, I'd almost be willing to bet that what little software they have sold they probably paid for it in itself already. |
I guess what I'm asking is whether there is a price deconstruction that can peg the original cost. For example, the PS3 was estimated to be around $830/per to manufacture (or some such) at launch. I know there's a lot more to it with marketing and R&D and so forth, but we should still be able to get a raw figure for per unit costs.
So let's say Sony sold 2M PSPs at a loss of $100, then they sold 5M PSPs at a loss of $50, and so on and so on ... Sure they're not losing as much money as the lifecycle goes on into its third and fourth year, but they might have to sell 10 units in 2007 to make back the money that one unit lost in 2005. I'm not able to find articles about this stuff as readily as what I can see for home consoles. How many units did they sell before they were breaking even?
It'd be neat to plot this out on two graphs, and see how many sold for a loss, how many sold at break even, and how many sold for profit, adjusting for when price drops occured. I'm wondering where the intersection point was for the PSP when Sony stopped losing money on it. Do we even know if they've reached that point yet?
