lool,,is that why xbox 360 was created after xbox ?xbox had nothing butl losses for MS,,,however they made another console.what makes you think that sony won't?

Yes but winning the HD war- but at what cost? So far its bled them into over $5 billions of losses. It will take a LONG time for them to recover from this loss. If SONY pictures hadnt tried to wriggle its way into SONY gaming you might have a cheap, powerful cheerful and far succesful PS3 instead that product is now called the xbox 360.

Some quick thoughts

1. The story is currently free as a sample of subscriber content (as is the popular story of a Russian professor (and former KGBer) predicting the disintegration of the US in 2010 -- which ironically was the subject of a video game on the original Xbox).

2. The Sony data is for the first half of the year. So there is a lot of interpretation to those numbers.

3. Falling sales could help the game division. Less products sold at loss means less gross revenue but also means less loss -- unless you have already produced the units, in which case it means mounting losses. Meanwhile, other Sony products are slumping in sales, hurting the company's overall financial picture.

Mike from Morgantown

Year-over-year  comparisons:

PS3 sales are down around 20%, so let's say around 1 million less PS3s during the holiday season. At a $50-$100 loss per unit, that means they're saving $50-$100 million dollars due to lower hardware sales during two months.

On the other hand, PS2 software sales are down 2.4 million last week. At $10-$25 revenue per software unit, that's a $24-$60 million loss in one week alone.

PS3 hardware savings due to lower sales don't compensate for the negative factors separately, let alone when they're put together.

SONY you can do it.Come on now.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I'm not sure why there is so much optimism in this thread. It looks like Sony's game division has lost about 400 billion yen from '06 through the first half of '08. The second half of '08 is looking even worse.

Now look at the most profitable year, '02 for the games division. Just over 100 billion yen. Sony would need FOUR years like that to break even on the PS3 era. I don't see that happening.

Some people are just grasping at straws for reasons why 2009 won't be another dismal year for SCE. There are some positives for the year, but they're completely drowned out by the negative factors.

Right now the biggest positive I see is that Japan's Central Bank might intervene to weaken the Yen in order to save exporters. Even if that happens SCE is still in a pickle though, just not one as monumental as the one they're in now.

Sony current  FY end 31 march 2009.

So you mean next FY I suppose. Well we'll see