Don't forget that Handhelds and SW on gamecub and HH were very big.

And at people that say having no debt is good. It all depends, if you can take money borrowed at 4%year and invest or borrow at a rate of 8% you would be silly to preffer to have no debt and no profit.

I mean, they had once. maybe not anymore

Risk taking. The point is that the debt is easily payable but you choose not to pay it. Having no debt at all means you don't owe anyone...

I'm not sure if their mobile and TV divisions have made a cumulative net profit over the course of the years. At the very least a lot of the profits they got from it has been ereased by now.

Now say life insurance, and we're talking something else. That's Sony's true cash cow.

So what caused the huge debt spike for Sony last year? Did the engine for The Order really cost that much?

Imma just copy paste my reply to another user asking the same question:

"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."

Lets be honest. If Sony and MS were gaming only, and not giant mega conglomerates or near monopolies, they would both be shut down and out of the gaming business. PS3 would have killed Sony and MS would have been destroyed with the OG Xbox.

Nintendo is the only real gaming company and are just now starting to branch out into other ventures. But even then those ventures are based on their gaming ventures. The fact that they have this sort of stability even during the darkest of times shows how great Nintendo is with money.

What kind of liabilities does Nintendo have? Maybe dividends to pay?

Well sony is also a lot more than a video game company. 

As for nintendos shape, it worked for them thus far but I fear its not gonna work for them anymore. And even now they are about to make another snaffu. Releasing the NX in 2016/2017 that will be on par with consoles (1080p) that in 2/3yrs from  now will come out with successors that will be 4k consoles at a time when 4k would have been mainstream. It's like they insist on being behind the curve. 

Yes, when have Nintendo done bad in gaming? Never. On PS2 gen they had big profits because of Gameboy +Advanced+DS that was why they passed N64 and GC in comfort. This gen they had 3DS and WiiU selling 60M and stil aren't very good on profitability. So yes if Nintendo was a console only (no HH) they probably would have already left the gaming space, if you want to add HH they have been winning the race for all gens so your point doesn't hold.

So basically it seems like you don't know very well the point you are making and you don't have the numbers on how well Sony or MS would be doing if they were console only... And it should be obvious that a company the size of MS console bussiness is irrelevant. And on Sony part it is becoming more relevant. 

So I ask again, what is your point if you were looking correctly at the numbers?

TV was giving then losses for the last 10 years before it game small profits in 2015. Mobile is something like small profit and big losses for the last 5 years... Kowen probably have the numbers and remember the trend from the top of his mind. So nope TV and Mobile isn't what make they stand, finance services is stronger there.