| src said: Even your claim about profit was wrong considering Playstation had considerably better profits than Nintendo last year, and presumably the years before that with the PS4. |
For the last decade you would be right most often than not (about 7 vs 3).
The cause is the presence of two contemporary and opposing trends:
1) During the last decade Nintendo lived through what was by far its worst hardware cycle in fact Nintendo incurred in losses for the first time ever since they entered the videogame business.
It was unprecedented for a company like Nintendo which was always profitable and often achieved what Nintendo management uses to calls "Nintendo like profits" (about 100Bn yen per year or more).
2) Roughly at the same time Sony had with PS4 what is by far its best hardware cycle ever, by a long shot!
To gives an idea how sharp was the improvement: the PS4 era was more profitable than the PS1 and PS2 era combined (for obvious reason I don't count the PS3 era since it was a big money loser for Sony).
This jump in profitability was possible because, contrary to the previous generation, Sony cornered the market from the beginning AND Sony pursued the expansion of digital sales which was the defining trend of the past decade.
Digital sales guarantee higher margin compared to physical goods, therefore Sony G&NS achieved an unprecedented profitability in its history.
The expansion of the digital business is so mature for Sony G&NS that in the last fiscal year more than 60% of its revenue was related to network service/digital sales.
However overall, historically, Nintendo out profited Sony's Game division by a big margin, for which I mean Nintendo was several times more profitable than Sony's Game division (approximately 3.5x).
Since the fiscal year ending March 1995 (when PS1 was launched in Japan) these are the cumulative operating profits earned by Nintendo and Sony's Game division:
Nintendo: 3.46 trillion yen
Sony's Game division: 0.99 trillion yen
Nintendo's cumulative operating profits since they released the Famicom in 1983 totaled about 4.33 trillion yen.
Last edited by Endymion - on 02 March 2020
