L.A. Noire was once a six-disc game on Xbox 360

[Mr Puggsly]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Isn't $6bln the losses for the whole division, including many products different from consoles? It includes R&D anyway, but yes, even considering unrelated and related but justifiable costs it's hefty compared to, for example, the estimated less than $1bln for Wii R&D, followed by HW profitable since launch, so no further losses (since Wii launch, IIRC, Ninty only had one or two quarters at a loss). It will be remembered as an example of the razor and blades model gone too far.    Although currently the chances of recovering (obviously considering SW and movies too, otherwise from HW only PS3 would need to sell at least 120M units to recover the losses, rough estimate based on initial heavy losses and the fact that even now that it's profitable, Sony will always get a relatively small margin to keep it competitive) aren't bad as they were before Slim and cut to $300 and even worse before the first significant cut to $400.

About the presumed MS royalty, curiously it looks like on the net there are only indirect sources both claiming or denying it. I can't find the link at the moment, but I read somewhere that additional royalties could be due not for MS fault but for the techs used in XB360 discs (like copy protection, etc) and this could be compatible with what Willits stated.

PS: Sorry for the late answer, net and phone not working for two days...

I'm not sure what else the division includes or what was added over years. But when the PS3 was added to the fold coincidentally there were mega losses. I doubt Sony was pissing away that kind of money in something else. I'd assume PS2 and PSP were also making great profits from 2006 - 2009. So its hard to determine how much PS3 a lone lost.

The 360 discs having royalties, that's hearsay until we find a source. All we know now is apparently MS doesn't charge extra per disc.