@Jerry, for all we know, they could be the R&D for playstation technology ^_^ You never know :P

I think most in the thread have agreed that SCE wont close or be sold off, however, most do see a retration of studios or a reduction of head count. most have also listed that the divisions you see as going first will. the speculation on SCE mainly rides on how bad things are at sony, if things got bad enough, SCE could be a division sold at a good profit to clear debt, heck the debt might even be packaged into the division.... basicaly SCE can be used to right what ails sony if things get really bad, it will buy sony a decade to rebuild and fix things

^Stringer (The British CEO) had done Ok until a couple of years back, he got their profit margins up.

If, when you refer to Activision, you actually mean Activision/Blizzard, then I think they will be doing plenty well in the coming 5 years with Diablo 3 and starcraft 2, as well as the reenergizing WoW expansion.

^Yea but in general there have been reports of publisher substantially falling short of financial expectations

In fact, according to traditional japanese business (the way a majority of things are still run) "parent" companies like Sony, will often push their debt onto smaller companies that are oftentimes in the midst of tanking, which will declare bankrupcy and protect the parent company.

Yeah, sorry for reiterating everything, I just read all three pages and think that some people really just want SCE to close for no reason other than preference. They have no factual analysis, and say things like "You are stupid if you think they won't close SCE", nonsense I say, given one or two years it just may be their most profitable division.

If they do that though, won't potential creditors/investors not trust sony any more, I wouldn't finance a company that handled their debt to me that way.

Sony as a gaming company might see dramatic changes like having unprofitable divisions (Sony Online Entertainment) closed, profitable divisions or IPs sold to generate revenue to balance out losses, and lower investment on game development and hardware R&D. I suspect that long before Sony closed SCE and/or cancled the PS3 you would see the division sold to another company.

So, theres now like 10% chance a PS3 price cut will hit 2009?

I seem to have my wires crossed, maybe I misread something when reading about walkman and plans to stop distributing VHS recorders. Blah. My bad there.