wait... isnt the loses lower than last quarter? And as a company I;m pretty sure I remember that turned a profit.

Sony doesn't have a lot of major brands.

Uncharted and Resistance are nice, but not major sytem sellers like Halo or Zelda. Let alone Heavenly Sword or Lair.

Sony only really needs: Gran Turismo, Ratchet & Clank, God of War and the Singstar series. Maybe SOCOM and team ICO for the core fans. All other series don't add real value to Sony.

Sony always has been relient on 3rd party (exclusives) like GTA, PES, Final Fantasy etc.

For a successfull PS4 they need to somehow convince some of these games to become exclusive again or there'll be trouble. Microsofts first party games are now much more popular than before and arguable match or surpass Sony. Halo, Fable, Gears, Forza all add major value to MS.

Bolded part: what do you mean?

They did turn a profit in the last quarter (Sony, not SCE). I'm still trying to find the miracle which would allow them to repeat that feat during this one.

They need to give the studios which are important the resources they need to perform. In terms of maintaining the PS3, a high selling studio will have a far greater effect than a studio which is underperforming anyway. These are the studios which will create the franchises to both make money and develop a long term relationship with their fans. In the creative industry an average effort isn't worth much at all. We're talking about an industry where a few % points on the metacritic charts seperates a million seller from games which don't break even. So fewer, more successful studios are a better way to make money especially since they can only release on one platform and must outcompete the multi-platform games. This is a lesson EA should try to learn sometime.

I don't really want to talk about the PS4, so much to deal with right now.

If they close first party studios they can as well stop producing ps3. There would be absolutly no point in buying it over x360 (other than BD and free online).

@Squilliam: I agree with you, and with BengaBenga's reply too.

BTW Zlejedi I just realized I forgot to reply to your question. The reason for doing quarter forecasts is that companies release financial results in every quarter.

I;m meaning for SCE not Sony as a whole.

But you do know their Q3 includes Black Friday right? Based off their fiscal calender Q4 starts Jan 1st for Sony. Q3 is safe for them as the holiday season should see a nice profit all around. Even the game division should turn a profit if sales are decent enough and manufacturing costs are cheap enough. The 160GB SKU of the PS3 should be a profitable SKU since the HDD size increase only costs maybe $10 more than the 80GB SKU's HDD.

Troll alert, MSNOLP!

@ssj12: I've already written plenty of posts explaining why I think they can't turn a profit in this quarter. To put it simply it's the exchange rates combined with Sony's low profit margins (although lower consumer electronics sales won't help).

Then today I found a quote from Sony's CFO essentially arriving to the same conclusions as I (it's quoted in page 5 of this thread).

I find all the talk of closing 1st parties and plans by vivid 360 fans to discontinue the PS3 in this thread funny at this point.

It makes no sense at all, in a worst case scenario Sony would up the PS3 hardware pricing up to break even levels, concentrating on profitable software sales.

That's of course not the case, the price of a PS2 is even being / has been dropped to 69-79 Euros at big retailers like Media Markt or Aldi. That's pretty aggressive pricing to compete for the low end market.