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bigtakilla on 25 September 2015
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foxtail said:
Scisca said:

Remember one thing. The main reason for the ridiculous losses PS3 generated was the BluRay player. Still, PS3 allowed Sony to defeat HD DVD and now BR is the last standard physical format. Hence everything Sony has earned due to BR has to be added to the PS3 equation and that has to be quite a lot of monies. PS3 is not a big fat fail, neither is Vita. You're just not looking at the whole picture.

Though another thing to note is that Blu-ray is not a wholly owned Sony property.  It is made up of a group of different patent holders of which Sony is not even the majority holder.  One early analyst estimated that Sony held less than 30% of the IP.  I've also read that Panasonic holds more Blu-ray patents on the disc drive and optical discs than any other single member of the group.  But the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is large group, and with so many different members it's royalty scheme may get complicated.

The advent of Blu-ray also meant the decline of DVD which was far more lucrative for Sony.  DVD too was more widely adopted.

It's hard to say but it also seems like the future of the optical media industry is not so rosey.

In 2012 Sony was reported to close "Sony Optiarc", a wholly-owned subsidiary responsible for the production of optical disc drives. - source

Also in 2014 Sony reported the following 25 billion yen impairment charge due to the decline in the disc manufacturing business.

"Sony expects to record approximately 25 billion yen in impairment charges mainly related to its overseas disc manufacturing business. Primarily due to demand for physical media contracting faster than anticipated, mainly in the European region, the future profitability of the disc manufacturing business has been revised. Consequently, Sony has determined that it does not expect to generate sufficient cash flow in the future to recover the carrying amount of long-lived assets, resulting in an expected impairment charge. Primarily due to the reason mentioned above, the fair value of the entire disc manufacturing business also has decreased, resulting in an expected impairment of goodwill." - source

Overall Blu-ray is in a faster decline than Sony projected so they won't get the profits from it that they wanted or expected.

It's just a reality that physical media is going away, like it or not. Nintendo may be the first ones to ditch it in their next console as well. And even if not, it's only a matter of time.