I am not amused.

Right now even though stringer say a focus on software and not hardware is not really words that are set in stone since on the whole the company is not happy with him and there are some people at the top who are looking to get rid of him.

For people who are talking about Sony Ericsson:

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/viewer/07q4/slide/image/13_image.jpg
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/viewer/08q2/slide/image/10_image.jpg
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/viewer/08q1/slide/image/11_image.jpg

As you can see, in the last three quarters they only posted one loss, and it was a very small one.

 Looking to get rid of who?

Yeah, SCE has been having problems of late, but ps3 had a solid year in 2008, and it was MUCH improved over 2007.  The question is whether it can continue to improve in 2009.

Now what I COULD see SCE doing is cutting off some of it's second party ties. Most of their bombs have come from second parties. Lair probably lost them the most, but franchises like Folklore (a franchise Game Republic already said will not be continued) probably didn't sell enough to make a profit either, despite (probable) lower development costs. Demon's Souls looks to be the next flop, if it ends up as bad as the TGS demos made it seem.

Outside of Insomniac (and possibly Sucker Punch, though that remains to be seen), their second party affiliates have been Sony's weakest link, from a publishing standpoint.

true i know none of us here want it but i think sony's game division is going to be one of the hardest hit in the entire company.  How can sony ignore changes to a part of the company that is litterally losing them billions of dollars? it seems a heavy restructure is almost all but certain for SCE

A shitty game on any console is still a shitty game. The core gameplay wouldn't be affected by what console the game's on. And from what I understand the most recent Sonic games suck because of horrible game play. So even if Sega has it on their own system, they know how to juice it for the best graphics and processing, if the gameplay sucks ass it's still same shitty new Sonic.

It's an interesting one, if Sony ever did drop out the console war, although I've always been a PS3 fan I'd sort of be excited. The HD console type market doesn't need 2 competitors, and it's ultimately holding back the potential quality of software. That is most likely a discussion for another thread.

I don't think Sony are in as much trouble as the media might like to suggest. They're just too big of a company, and even when they're in trouble, there are alot of 'get out clauses' for companies on this scale, normally splitting the company up into seperate companies. I'm no econmoist so I've no idea how it works but I've watched some convincing TV programs about historical examples or something.

Anyway enough rambling, I don't think any of SCE which is really touchable is unprofitable. I don't think any of the software studio's are costing them more then they make (Except maybe ICO), if they wanted to make SCE profitable it'd involve a... PS3 price raise?

No the question is if a slightly improved 2008 or possible 2009 is a little too little too late