How much does a ps4 cost Sony to make?

[Ariakon]

RolStoppable said:

Certainly more than $200 at the moment. Some people look at bill of materials (BoM) estimates and completely forget that assembling, packaging and shipping comes at a cost too, plus the marketing money that is spent on advertising the hardware needs to be made back as well. Just like games need to made back their development, packaging and marketing costs in order to be profitable.

$199 is going to be the lowest the PS4 will go on a permanent basis, because the PS2 days are long over. The PS4 comes with capabilities like storage and wi-fi out of the box, so price points of $149, $129, let alone $99 aren't realistic for home consoles anymore.

Needless to say, today's €199 offer in Europe means that these PS4s will be sold at a notable loss, but that's of course expected to pay off down the line, because the customers are buying games and possibly paying for PS+ for a few years.

This seems very realistic, otherwise we would be seeing huge profits from hardware in Sony's quarterly reports. Their gaming division is doing extremely well at the moment, but a lot of that profit seems to come from PSN itself. It's likely that the actual profit for hardware sold is quite low, but they are gaining enough from adding users to offset any loss from temporary sales such as the one in Europe. Still, the Slim has seemed to cut the costs quite a bit, as they seem much more willing to price drop it than they were the OG ps4.