Ps3 price cut all but confirmed before xmas .

[Bodhesatva]

ckmlb said:

Bodhesatva said:

ChichiriMuyo said:

Bodhesatva said:

because a price drop stands to cost their favorite company hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars. It's as if they think that nothing else matters.

Have you ever heard of Blu-Ray? It stands to make Sony hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars. And do you know what hope it rides on? The PS3. You think Sony is going to lose a lot of money by dropping the price of the PS3 by $100-150, despite massive cuts to their costs since launch, yet you can completely ignore all of the money they put into BR that'd be lost if the PS3 fails? Are you kidding, or just completely bonkers?

Do you have any information -- any at all -- to back your claim that Sony will make billions of dollars off Blu-Ray licensing? Not just the Blu-Ray association, mind you, but Sony itself.

Because you know Sony is a charity organization they're gonna give all their money to the rest of the Blu-Ray Association.

I'm not suggesting that Sony wouldn't make ANY money. I'm suggesting that Billions is... a lot. The Blu-Ray disc association consists of the following companies:

• Apple Inc.
• Buena Vista Home Entertainment
• Dell
• Hewlett Packard
• Hitachi
• LG Electronics
• Mitsubishi Electric
• Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
• Pioneer Corporation
• Royal Philips Electronics
• Samsung Electronics
• Sharp Corporation
• Sony Corporation
• Sun Microsystems
• TDK Corporation
• Thomson
• Twentieth Century Fox
• Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group

As well as Warner Home Video Inc. These are simply the "founders" by the way -- the "memebers" tally over 250, and every one of them gets a share of the profits. Now, I'm no expert, but that means the patents (not the actual profits from the movies themselves, which go to the respective movie companies) would need to gross 19 billion dollars to give the average company in here a billion dollar return.

My understanding is that DVD patents -- the sum total -- returned about 600-700 million. I also understand that liscensing the DVD format cost cents, not dollars, per movie. I'm certainly willing to believe that portions of my math are incorrect, because, as I've already suggested, I'm not an expert on the subject. But 1) you have to show me I'm incorrect and 2) I'd have to be really, really incorrect, as a few hundred millions dollars in the patent values would only yield a 10-30 million dollar increase for Sony specifically. As far as I can tell, they don't stand to gain anywhere close to a billion dollar return on these patents.

And this doesn't even tackle another issue that ChiChi brought up: he apparently assumes that Sony is doomed to defeat in the format war if the PS3 fails, and is assured victory if the PS3 wins. Neither of those can be assumed, so dropping the price precipitously bears the same risk with Blu-Ray as it does with the system itself; dropping the price doesn't assure anything.