What on earth are you talking about?  The reason they lost last two gens had nothing to do with the fact they were selling the console at a profit.  It was due to a head start for PS1, developers being driven to the PS1, brand name for PS2, an early start, games, etc.  Selling at a profit is the best advice you can give to any console manufacturer.  You just need to look at Nintendo's recent financial reports to see that. 

ahh more signs of consumers thinking they have years of experience about profits and running a business. when will people learn.

Uhh besides the ability to play FMV (which isn't to be understated in this situation) the PS1 had inferior graphical capabilities to the N64. The CD drive, game price, and Nintendo's blowhard stance towards developers was the real death nell there.

Sony dropped prices on the PS1 to compete with the Saturn initially, and forced Nintendo to do the same. The loss they were taking was never significant so it was never that big of a deal in relative comparison. The PS2 obviously took a larger loss, but Sony was in the position at the time to take a loss. That being said, having a one year head start to build a market base sure helped a lot more than dropping the price at near the exact same time as both of its competitors.

On another note, why is this guy getting crucified for suggesting that Sony is making a poor market decision? They obviously could use a bump to get them above their current sales position and it seems sort of like their current strategy isn't working. Sony has made a lot of mistakes this generation, which I don't think you can fault the writer of this article for noting. the fact that he suggest that they are really hurting themselves in this market to keep investors happy in the short term does not seem to be such a terrible conclusion.

Nintendo has always been able to profit, even in the N64 and Gamecube days.  Selling their consoles at a loss would have hurt their ablilty to so that.  That is very important since Nintendo is all about gaming, but Sony has other divisions to fall back on in case they do make a mistake.

I don't think that is why people are saying he is wrong.  Sony has definitely made many mistakes this gen, the biggest of which is probably coming out with such a high priced console to begin with.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but it sounds like most of us think that price cuts would be bad in the long term for Sony right now.  The game division has already lost a lot of money, and I don't think compounding that problem right now would be a good decision.  PS3s are selling about on par with the 360 right now, even though it is more expensive.  That is a decent position to be in, so they can wait until manufacturing costs come down even more before making a price cut.

No matter what anyone does, it looks like 2nd and 3rd place are going to be very close this generation.  That means it is just not worth it to go overboard to try and change that.  It is probably better to make some money, and reload for next generation.  Then you can make better decisions from the start, instead of trying to hit the hail mary pass right now.

I didn't read it, mainly because all these articles say the same thing in them.

This is getting old and out of hand, please don't post anymore of these.

Sony is cool calm and collected. Good thing cnet and a lot of ignorant people aren't running Sony cuz they would have pissed their pants out of the gate by now. Go on Sony. Do your thing. All in good time :)

This article would of been fine if they just replaced Sony with Nintendo, then I probably wouldn't have cared to read any of it. But I actually wanted to see what they could come up with.


By the by isn't CNET owned by Microsoft?