Well, my avatar tells you alot about the last generation. I compiled those numbers fro the Annual Reports of Sony, MS and Nintendo. For Nintendo they refer to the whole company, for Sony and Microsoft to their respective games divisions (Sony Computer Entertainment and Microsoft Home & Entertainment which is now called Microsoft Entertainment & Devices.) I could not find more info from Sony though. I guess they don't tell you how much they made on the PS1, at least not in the financial reports.

Reverie,

                 I'm really grateful for your knowledge and input on all this.

I like the fact that you have narrowed down the gaming divisions of Sony and Microsoft’s respectfully.  It's a rather steep fall for Sony from the looks of your chart.

Considering that PS2 only made two billion, and I'm sure Sony lost more money attempting to get into the gaming market, I have a feeling they made less with Playstation than they did with PS2.

Especially since they seemed to introduce, at least effectively, significantly pricing their units lower than the actual production cost of their console hardware. 

Well, it's true but as someone said before, it's a matter of repercution. If the HD-DVD become the norm in the US (because of Wallmart), then most of US movies will have HD-DVD release which will of course have a huge impact on the rest of the world, including europe. Furthermore, several european studios have already choose to support HD-DVD format because it's cheaper to produce (I mean to produce the HD-DVD version).

The strengh of the BR right now is the installed base of PS3, which "appeared" massively, but isen't expending that much fast...

Sorry - double clic

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=257&start=-0

^^Bumped an old thread for you. Not sure if the "2007" numbers are accurate.

Also, I think Sony only makes about 9 dollars for each PS2 sold right now. For all the heat they take for their hardware, Nintendo had EASILY the best hardware last gen. Gamecube managed to be way cheaper and yet significantly more powerful that PS2. XBox was more powerful, but a trainwreck in terms of cost and the losses they took.

Thanks, it's appreciated! Sony's 07 loss is still their forecast though, same for Nintendo's. MS' 07 loss is not even a forecast, just my ballpark figure. About Sony and Nintendo we will know for sure in a couple of days. MS' financial year ends in June, though quarterly results for the March quarter will tell us more soon.

To assess the PS1 you would probably have to look at software sales for that time, too. Weren't they bigger? I don't trust vgchartz' historic data anymore like I used to, so it would be searching in old annual reports again to find out.

On the quality of my numbers, I'd like to see somebody challenging it. I don't have any knowledge in that field, just took the numbers out of the reports. Maybe the PS2 made more than $2 billion, but I'd like to see the calculation for that.

As it stands, Microsoft would have to pull of at least 2 generations of PS-like market dominance to recover the XBox 1 losses alone.

Edit: Thanks Eric, I'll move to that thread.

Erik,

         Thanks for the thread. Really good stuff. $9 dollars eh? Any idea when they started to make that? ( What price was the PS2 cut to, in order to start turning out the Hamilton?)

The more I am able to analyze the numbers, it really seems that Nintendo is the only artist of the industry these days, in which the rich kids ( Sony and MS ) are tying to mimic, yet can't compete with in regards to sheer talent.

 

Reverie,

                Yeah I imagine that one would have to check out the software sales as well. But it seems a bit of a challenge to find out the hardware sales currently. So I figured I would try and hunt for software sales figures later.

I would love to get some approximate sales figures for software sales for the consoles eventually too.

When you put the profits Sony put up with the PS2, and contrast the red grave MS built with the Xbox, it really becomes astounding. I think Erik has it right: Xbox was a train wreck.

I dont think walmarts hd dvd deal means its supporting that format, rather once there is a low cost blu ray player they will probably sell those aswell.

 As for the profits of dominating the gamming industry i think any amount in the billions is still a low even if its a low profit margin, and as stated before the dominant company can get more then just the gamming biz

4 Billion lost is ALWAYS a trainwreck! I mean good God, 4 billion?!?!?! That's 4 Oprahs!!!! And that's a lot of weight, baby.

Looking at Reverie's avatar...The PS2's dominance and yet it never went above Nintendo in drought. Not ONCE. Weird. These giants fighting this average sized man and still not overcoming him. Reminds me of a DBZ fight, seriously. LOL!

That short spike for MS MUST have been for Halo 2. Wow.

Reverie, put up charts for this generation and let's follow these profit margins to see who put in the work this gen so far. So appropiate that Nintendo's line color was GREEN and Microsoft's was RED. LOL! I could do something with Sony's BLUE line but it might cause a commotion in here so I'll keep it to myself.

John Lucas

You're talking about Microsoft, who just spent 5 billion dollars to make Vista. Thats 5 billion freaking dollars. They had thousands of programmers working for 5 years on this thing, and Vista still isn't even that good. LOL. I think Bill gates decided "well, I'll probably live 50 more years, so that means I can waste 1 billion every year!"