Sony have already won...

[Linkzmax]

fkusumot said:

leo-j said:
WellFKUMOST

according to sony they have sold over a billion software(ps2 alone) they make money of of that.

Im guessing they made much more money then they lost before. Now its different though.

Joel, X-Man specifically said that:

"Sony has made more money on PS1 and PS2 software, then they have lost on PS3 hardware".

When I asked him to prove that statement he could not provide any numbers of how much money the PS1/PS2 software made or how much money the PS3 has lost. He could not back his statement up. What you wrote doesn't help to provide the specific information needed.

This discussion made me curious myself, so I took the two earnings reports for Q1 and Q2 of '08 and dug through annual reports back to '97 when operating income for the Games Division was first reported(The Games Division wasn't reported separately until '98 but it did give numbers for the '97 year).  The following information is all available from http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/

1997    57.0
1998    116.9
1999    136.5
2000    76.9
2001    -51.1
2002    82.9
2003    112.7
2004    67.6
2005    43.2
2006    8.7
2007    -232.3
Q108    -29.2
Q208    -96.7

 All numbers are in billions of yen, though I haven't adjusted them for rising/falling strength of the yen.  The total is +293.1B yen.  This doesn't account for R&D losses for the original PlayStation that were most likely absorbed in 1996 by the Electronics Division, but considering the Electronics Division saw an increase in operating income from '95 to '96 the losses probably weren't very large(tens of billions or less instead of hundreds of billions).  Anyway, this show that Sony has indeed lost less on PS3 software than it has on PS1/PS2 software, but it has blown through the profits from PS2 alone and it's likely to take a good chunk out of the profts from PS1 in the next year or so(As Sony themselves have stated it will be some time before they're at the break-even point).