GameStop expects only one new console for 2013, another one in 2014

[Dodece]

@Chark

I will gladly explain my reasoning to number eight with you. The crux of the issue is that R&D is indistinguishable on the whole from the cost of doing business. What the cost of doing business refers to is persistent costs that do not go away. Employees are a persistent cost, and most of the employees that will undertake R&D are already working at Sony, and would be working at Sony even if the the PS4 weren't under development.

Legal negotiations are handled by Sony's legal department. This department wouldn't change in response to the development of a new product. These people are continually performing negotiations. A new task will not add anything to the cost, because a old task would have just been finished before they started on the new one. If it wasn't the PS4 it would have been something else.

Planning is what management does. They go to meetings every day of the week. It isn't like meetings would just suddenly become more expensive. These people are paid a salary to work on any project put in front of them. If it wasn't the PS4 it would have been some other device.

Engineering is done by engineers, and yeah Sony probably has a dedicated staff of those. If they weren't designing the architecture of the PS4. They would be designing the architecture of something else. Once again these are people who are already paid for whether the PS4 is there or not.

Market research yeah you guessed it Sony has a staff to do this, but they could subcontract, but then again that contract could be for a variety of products. Anyway this research wouldn't necessarily be product specific. To put it another way it would be applicable to many products. It serves the company as a whole, and not any product in particular.

Finally we get to hardware testing. This could cost Sony a lot of money, or almost nothing at all. You see it really depends on what the design calls for. If Sony wants to use its own proprietary technology. Then it does have to test that technology. However the opposite could be true if Sony chooses to just use components that may be well understood, or buy components from third parties who will have already done their own internal testing, and are going to give Sony those numbers at the outset. In which case all Sony has to do is plug the numbers, and any testing would just be basic quality assurance. Which would have been testing that once again would have been done on another product if it weren't the PS4.

The problem with R&D is that they are bullshit numbers, because they can be anything from billions of dollars to nothing out of the ordinary. If Sony makes due with what it already has, and with what it will spend anyway. Then there isn't a added cost. If Sony gets really ambitious, and tries to do a lot of new or difficult things. Then they are going to end up spending a lot of money.

I for one am not going to speculate on how much work Sony is going to put into its new machine. They could do a Nintendo, and play it safe with what amounts to known hardware. They would probably spend less on that then Nintendo did with the Wii, because Sony has more built in redundancy. Then again Sony could repeat the PS3 with a whole bunch of proprietary things that they have to spend a lot of time and money working out.

Building a console is a lot like any one of us building our own personal computer. You could spend a lot of time, and money building motherboards, and cards from scratch. You could also do what most people choose to do. Which is buy parts that were already tested, certified to work together, and supported by dedicated software. It remains to be seen what Sony tries to do. What I can say is most of the commentary out of Sony concerning how they would build a future console has centered around a off the shelf model.

Anyway you haven't disproved my point at all. Arguing that R&D should cost more. Doesn't change the math that I presented. What I presented didn't allow for any R&D costs. So they cannot subtract from that assessment. All they could do was add to my assessment. I am only dealing in concrete here, and the machine being profitable isn't the issue at all.

The issue is whether Sony would have the liquid capitol to spend to bring a machine to market in the near term. Given Sony's current financial situation. Sony probably doesn't have a huge pile of cash waiting around doing nothing at all. Plus with their stock performance, liabilities, current economic climate, and the performance of the previous product. Which lost the company billions of dollars that will probably never be recouped by that machine. Sony is hardly in a ideal position to get loans to cover that upfront cost, or at least loans with anything like a good interest rate.

I am not saying that Sony cannot release a new console next year, but I need to see proof that it is really doable. Find me where Sony is going to get the money to do this. Don't give me any magical thinking about Sony having a magic sack of money either. Tell me where the money is going to come from. Hell find me just two billion for a start.