Nintendo's debt is amazing! haha

It looks like all 3 are doing well, but our opinions are going to be shallow anyway because MS and Sony have many divisions and different business. It would be cooler to have a dedicated data for the gaming divisions of each company .

Liabilites were just moved in the balance sheet.

Those figures are in yen, but as you can see, there's a roughly equivalent decrease in "Other Current Liabilities" to the increase in "Short Term Debt" when going from 2014 to 2015.

'funny' in the sense that Nintendo is painted as doing badly when they aren't even losing much of any money. I by no means expect Sony to go out of business, and they're clearly a much larger company anyway

revenue is useless if you're working on an operating loss in the process of creating and selling your products

Sony's problem at times has been that they have spent more in R&D and production of certain products then they have made in selling them. It just really depends. there are some gigantic on paper companies out there who end up only netting a little bit of profit each year due to the slim margins (look at the fast food industry for example)

Not fair to compare Nintendo to Sony and Microsoft, since Sony and Microsoft are not pure video game companies.
Better comparison with EA, Ubisoft, Activision ect.

Ah, I see. Thank you.

its actually not 'healthy' to have any debt at all

its a false concept in society that having some debt is good, and the only reason for that is that it gives creditors and banks something to look at in terms of your history and reliability. if you have debt and pay it off then people consider you trustworthy. nothing more

the concept that 'debt is good' makes zero sense

especially when we're talking a company of Nintendo's size- they don't need to prove their standing or reliabliity to institutions to borrow money so the only reason to have debt at any point is a moot point for them. if anything at the point of a billion dollar company the LACK of debt is something investors and prospectors are going to find appealing, a consistent company that generally goes up and not down

granted some investors will be interested in a company that frequently borrows money because volatile companies like that can be unpredictable and have big stock swings which obviously excite the gambling sort of investor 

if the concept of having significant debt was good then Sony would not be under so much scrutiny and judgement over the last few years. its actually a scary place to be in because once you get a bit behind on it things can get out of control

its true, its an odd comparison. Sony and Microsoft are so involved with other branches of electronics that its like apples and oranges. if somehow we could cut off their video game divisions then it would be more comparable 

although Microsoft's video game division pushes much less revenue than the other two (way less first party software and then obviously the lack of a competing handheld in video games)

revenue as a stat on its own is useless though. there are tons (and I mean tons) of billion dollar companies out there with, in some cases, tens of billions of dollars of sales in revenue who profit almost nothing

obviously revenue is good in the sense of your business is potentially operating at a high scale and pushing product, but very obviously sales is all about margins and in the end whether you have high revenue or low revenue cost and profit are really what matters

sort of reminds me of the PS2 and Gamecube generation- Nintendo sold way less hardware/software than Sony during those years yet somehow managed to profit a lot more. again, revenue on its own is a useless stat without context and other numbers to look at

haha what's crazy to think is that many individuals, like college grads, have more debt than a billion dollar company like Nintendo. pretty bizarre.