I am talking about the online-gameplay. As we know, the PSN gaming is free. You can play every game on dedicated servers. These servers are not for free to sony. In generel, to offer a online experience costs money.

On the other hand we have Xbox Live which costs 50€ in Germany and I guess 60 USD in the USA per year. There are no dedicated servers on Xbox Live, they prefer to let the gamers be the host. That is cheaper than providing dedicated servers. There are 12 million Xbox Live Users, don't know if they are silver or gold members, but let's calculate with 5 million gold-members. That would be 300 million USD / year, just for the fees. Of course there is XboxLive Arcade with a yearly revenue of another 80-100 million USD, according to VGC. I guess MS will get a small piece of that cake, too. And every third payed download on Xbox Live is a VoD. MS will also get some of this money.

And with Mc Donalds and Dorito starting to advertise on Xbox Live, there is another source to get money from.

I know, the PSN offers Arcade games, too. But there is no data at all and it is definately not as big as Xbox Live. So what is Sonys income for the online-section? There is advertising and there are some Arcade games and VoD. The revenue of the Arcade games is not for Sonly only, the developers want some money, too. Same for VoD and the movie studio (not talking about Sony pictures here)

We do not know the costs, but so far, this seems to me like MS is making a whole lot of money or Sony is losing a whole lot of money.

This is no flame at all, just some thoughts. Do you agree or did I forget something big?

Although there is no data to suggest how much money Sony makes from the online business, you can (most probably) assume this:

Both companies are making too much money on their online services.

Home will provide some kind of revenue soon, but in general they don't get much revenue from it short of Qore and downloads off the PSN. They obviously get money for hosting movie trailers and maybe even demos and game trailers.

 The Google search and Skype (in the PSP) would also be a form of revenue.

sony does not lose any money from the psn they most likely gain money, not as much as live but its still a profit.

end of topic

I would assume both companies are generating very large amounts of profit from their online business on the consoles.

I heard a journalist in the industry remark (on GT) a while back that online servers for games are becoming "dirt cheap to run and maintain". If so, Sony running dedicated servers might not be as much of a financial burden as you'd expect.

I would also make the logical assumption that Microsoft are making a much larger profit off XBL, given that they charge a fee.

developing home must have been expensive. They are working on it for years now. It will take a time untill home just breaks even.

and i don't think qore is gerating much money.

all games take money to develop....did you miss the fact that sony has generated profit from their software?? home is being sponsored most likely to tackle the developing cost, so sony probably didnt spend all that much.

and qore i think you highly underestimate. lets for sake say 50% of ps3 owners buy qore. so 15.39 million / 2 = 7.7 million. its $2 per episode, i believe, so $2 * 7.7 million = $15.39 million per episode.

just quick numbers, i can be wrong, just looks very profitable imo

I'm pretty sure that Sony aren't running servers for all of the games on the PS3 for free. I'm pretty sure most developers have to pay up, either to Sony or to whoever they are getting their servers ran at.

I know you said they were just quick numbers, but Qore is only available in the US