http://thewiikly.zogdog.com/article.php?article=97&ed=12

"Sony’s plans for the Playstation 3 also were placed on the idea of a super-dreadnought. With around the same power of the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3 is stuffed with the Cell chip, Blu-Ray, upgradable, and is being marketed more as a computer. The Playstation 3 reminds me of the Japanese super-dreadnought Yamato: the biggest strongest dreadnought of them and the last of all the dreadnoughts[..]In naval history, a new ship was unveiled which disrupted naval warfare forever. It was the submarine whose aim was to not even compete with the gigantic dreadnoughts. The submarine is vastly underpowered to the super-dreadnoughts. In fact, the submarine is barely an improvement to the previous generation of traditional ship technology.

Likewise, Nintendo’s Wii fills the same philosophy as the submarine. The Wii is small, sleek, compact, and just doesn’t compete at all with the super-dreadnoughts. If the PS3 and Xbox 360 attempt to target the Wii, they’ll just miss. The Wii doesn’t float on the surface like previous consoles did. The Wii can dive giving it access to the vast underwater space, something no ship had ever done before. In the same way, Nintendo’s plan for Wii is the Blue Ocean strategy meant to sell to people who normally wouldn’t buy video games.What is Wii’s weapon to do so? It is its unique phallic shaped motion controller. The wii-mote is the torpedo for the Wii.

Sony, alarmed at the growing excitement over the (Wii) controller, put the motion sensitivity as yet another armament in its overly puffed PS3 super-dreadnought. But what good does a torpedo do on a super-dreadnought? No, the torpedo’s effectiveness is due to a ship being underwater which can strike from anywhere.

When in the direct line of the big guns of the super-dreadnoughts, submarines get torn apart like paper. Indeed, the submarine must never compete directly with a super-dreadnought for with a few direct hits with a torpedo, it can sink the biggest of ships"

Now that was very accurate XD

haha nice!..... is all i want to say

I disagree that Sony is losing money on the PS3. Acutally Sony is making a slight profit on every console. Its just that if they reduce the price by $100, they will start losing money and to them its just not worth it to increase the market share that way. Sony has decided to sit pretty at the third spot at least for this season. They know that all they have to do is to make the PS3 survive, and they live to fight another day. Next generation, the console wars begin from square one again.
For folks who think the PS3 is doomed and compare it to Dreamcast, shud keep in mind that the video game market is constantly increasing and unlike the Dreamcast's time there is space now for 3 consoles to thrive at the same time. Sony already have the best exclusives of 2008 http://au.games.ign.com/articles/937/937519p1.html and now with Home they provide undeniable value to the potential customer. This will mean that they will continue to rack up PS3 sales and it will remain a viable console.

WTF????

Must Have = Opinion.
And honestly, PS3 an 360 libraries are like what??? 75%+ the same these days????

Fact 1: SCE (Playstation Division) loses money. Lots of it. Over 3 billion from the PS3 launch.
Fact 2: SCE has 3 hardware products, PS3, PSP, PS2
Fact 3: Sony makes money on every third party game sold (around $8 PS3, $5 PSP/PS2)

Please explain to me how the PS3 is profitable. It can be done, but only by assuming that either the PSP or PS2 are making insane losses (which is ridiculous) or that Sony's first party games are so expensive that they generate losses like that (for reference: the most expensive game ever is GTA IV at $100 million, so the SCE loss would equal 30 GTA's being in development). It's either that or the PS3 has to be a lossmaker.

@BengaBenga: You'd also have to assume that Sony is lying through their teeth to investors.

Not that the assumptions you mentioned need any adding, looking at those is more than enough to reach the same conclusion...

Look, roughly 9 months ago announced their business plan to sell around 10 mio PS3s this fiscal year. While the resident nutjobs in this forum immediately started to contradict and pulled numbers like 14-18 mio out of their imaginary hats, it seems that somebody inside Sony had a crystal ball as the current selling numbers almost exactly match the business plan. (And before you start to yodel "bbbbut.. Sony lied.... they planned to sell 15 mio units and played lowball" - no, a business plan is a commitment and not a proposition that can be changed without massive cost increases).

Obviously Sony was caught on the wrong foot with the economy meltdown and exchange rate troubles. Instead of achieving cost neutrality on the manufacturing level with its Playstaion line, they are now faced with overall losses on _all_ of their consoles. Unlike MS with the X360, Sony cannot afford the massive losses in manufacturing by ofsetting them with other profitable departments and more massive software revenues.

So to sum up for all the nutjobs hovering in those "Sony is doomed" threads:

a) The PS3 sells exactly as it was foreseen in the business plan.

b) Sony was caught by surprise by MS's price reductions - life is unfair - so be it

c) Sony currently cannot lower _any_ prices of _any_ gadgets they sell without going red as a whole company (notice how they announced unspecified price _increases_ a few weeks ago)

d) There are probably less than 10 people at Sony working on the PS4 (and absolutely none of those people waste any thoughts about "market share" - this is not a fanboy rat race, this is corporate business). At this stage, this project likely is in a "fortune teller" stage, as nobody knows where the road goes in the next five to 10 years, consumer and technology wise.

"a) The PS3 sells exactly as it was foreseen in the business plan.

b) Sony was caught by surprise by MS's price reductions - life is unfair - so be it"

I have to agree here. It was pretty clear many months ago that Sony wasn't expecting to drop prices, their goal was profitability. On the other hand, as you also wrote they weren't expecting the 360 to sell so much. So they're in a worse competitive position than they thought.

Actually, at this time with the current exchange rates, Sony very likely loses money on _every_ playstation manufactured, be it PS2, PSP or PS3 (certainly the latter one). They do not lose as much as MS loses with the lower end XBoxes, but they have nowhere near the profits from software sales to reduce the prices of any gadgets.

while i agree that sony is losing money on the ps3 microsoft can't be losing too much on low end xbox's cause they have been in black ink for like the past 3 quarters or so and soon to be a fourth with the big numbers their putting up