Man seriously.  Half the PS3's problems come from those 2 divisions.  Horrible commercials plus ridiculously horrible PR = horrible public image = no consumer trust = bad sales.   The commercials have gotten a little better, but they are still WAY too weird.  Nothing as bad as the old crying baby one though.  I still have nightmares from it.

The baseball commercial is pretty lame too. It does nothing to differentiate itself from other consoles. You could take that commerical, replace the image of the PS3 with a PS2 or 360 and nobody would know the difference.

Just seems logical to me its like a company that over expands itself and then comes back to reality I mean the PS2 and PS1 were huge success allowing for quite a few hires that Sony would not of made if they were selling 20-25 million consoles that generation. This time for the moment at least they aren't looking like the 100 million or 120 million in console sales that they had before so basically you just go off the diminishing returns ideology of hey we needed this guy when we sold 10 million consoles a year even though we have 10 guys better than him at his job. To me I can see this being a good thing for Sony your not as spread out anymore and can keep just your top quality people around I mean someone had a thread a while back about how the 3500 I think it was Nintendo employees were responsible on average for something like a million each in profits yet they seemed to keep around quite a few good people even when they only sold 21 million or so consoles and yes I understand their different as in the gamecube making a profit from the beginning but believe the point is still relevant.

They should air those movie-theater-quality commercials more often...those actually impress me, even if I know better. 5 sunflowers, 30 sunflowers, 50000000 sunflowers! yeah...

it's good news in the sense that sony realizes there is a problem... and taking action fixing it.

unfortunately it means SCE employees would be in poor morale for a bit longer.

i'm not a sony shareholder but if all its divisions are doing well its stock price would be going through the roof... unfortunately things just aren't looking up for its CE division.

"DEY TOOOK URRR JOBS!!"

Weezy you crazy man,lol. They should lay off the PR guys in Europe too.

That was SCEE - Sony Europe. They do have a rather large workforce though, trimming off a bit of the fat *might* help.

Note that it won't help in the short term though - those severance payments really DO hurt a company (100 employees is nothing though really... 1000 would hurt!).

Time for Sony to focus on hardware, and leave software/games to other companies...

They can't leave software to other companies. If they don't make games for their own platform, who will? And who will be the one responsible for getting the number of consoles sold up to a reasonable level which encourages 3rd parties to develop games?

Not yet, but we can definitely say there are people very high up in Sony who're annoyed at the losses the gaming division is making, and want to cut off the dead weight. We gamers know there are loads of great games coming out soon that will at least slightly boost sales, but all the suits with the money know is that they were also promised Gundam Musou, Motorstorm etc would "start the onslaught" as a few of our members have put it. Remember while Nintendo is all about games and will keep making them 'till the bitter end, or how Sega did exactly that, Sony is a very large company and the people who decide if the Playstation brand lives or dies have very little, if anything, to do with games.

Of course there's no way it'd happen this year.. First half of 2008 at the earliest, and that's if holiday sales are utterly terribly and a price cut doesn't work either.

You are correct Lingyis.

The only good news is that Sony realizes there is a problem.

But I wonder if they realize how serious the problem is. 100 Layoffs wont put a dent in the PS3 losses but it is a start.