Apologies, it's about 1.5- 2 billion rather then 3 billion, the article I was reading was incorrect.

As for other big spendings; Sony spent $260 million acquiring Gracenote, a technology company. Source

@NJ5- The BMG deal was settled in August. Only a few months ago. Surely they would have seen these economic problems on the horizon?

Either they were oblivious to the coming problems, or they're prepared to weather the storm.

@Dallinor: There were some indications throughout the year, but the real hit only came in September / October. They'd need to be really worried back in early August to suddenly cancel a deal which had been under negotiation for more than 2 years.

Weathering the storm is a relative term. How many jobs will they cut, how many product lines will they shed and how much will their competitiveness suffer? Stay tuned in 2009.

(on his knees praying) please let this game be a huge hit

Sure wish I knew what there definition of a "successful" game is, selling more then a million?, more then two million? five million??? I don't know but in my opinion it'll probably hit two million max. But two million would be a pretty big success, for a knew game like that.

Dammit, when I saw this thread, I saw "Level 5" and was thinking "Factor5."

Oops.

I don't think as much as you'd like and hope.

2 million? There's not a single JRPG on the 360 that has crossed 1 million. If WKC sells a million it will be a huge success, but I highly doubt it will happen. There's no JRPG fanbase on the PS3 (yet) and I imagine quite some JRPG fans bought a 360. Biggest PS3 game so far in Japan is MGS4 with some 650k copies. I think we can all agree that WKC won't do even half of that. And PS3 is strongest in the least JRPG minded region: Europe.

And still no-one has actually explained to me how Level 5 can be an asset for Sony. I don't see how they're ever going to make money on that.

Usually when a big name buys up a studio, the devs get lazy, or replaced with internal teams. I think the CEO of Level 5 must be getting tired and is looking for his retirement plan. No studio ever WANTS to be bought out by a bigger company. Yet, if the high ups in the company want to split the money from the sale, and spend their lives in the lap of luxury and not work anymore, the little guys on the team get 2 choices... 1 - stay and have new bosses OR 2 - leave the company

JRPG's sell really well in Japan as we all know that, and compared to the PS3 the userbase of the X360 is pretty small, and I was talking about LTD of 2 million and a big chunk of that is going to be from Japan. By the end of the generation it's safe to say that the userbase in Japan for the PS3 will be a minimum of 6 million PS3's. So let's say that WKC sold 750K in Japan LTD, well then for the rest of the world another 1.25 million which looks reasonable.

In time Level 5 will be a pretty big company and it would be smart for Sony to have them on there side. Like you said there's not much of a JRPG fanbase on the PS3 but Level 5 can be there trump card with that genre, there known for making top quality games. And you can't really rely on Square-Enix with that genre because from what I've seen it wouldn't surprise me if they completely abandoned the PS3 and went to another console to make FFXIV.