I've heard this theory many times, but so far no one has shown how much Sony receives in royalties for each BR disc sold (keeping in mind that there are more companies in the Blu-Ray association).

Maybe they're jsut going to give less money away to their second party developers. (Guerilla, Media Molecule) etc...

and stop advertising for other companies?

Yeah, the royalty breakdowns don't actually look great unless you assume they're charging more then DVD.  Which seems unlikely considering everyone throught DVD royalties were too high and you had two competing formats this time around.

The breakdowns were done a month or two ago and were pretty illuminating.

Whatever it is though... Sony makes less then 30% of it.

It's also interesting that Microsoft receives Blu-Ray royalties too, due to the VC-1 codec (I don't know if many BR titles use it)

Geurrilla has been first party since October 2005.  Media Molecule will likely continue to be funded quite nicely, since they developed the Sony's fastest selling ps3 title thus far, for a cost probably far below something like Killzone 2 or Gran Turismo 5 (Media Molecule to this day only employs 37 people).

However, I agree that their second parties will be the first to go.  This has already happened, with word that there will be no sequels to franchises like Folklore.  And of course Factor 5 parted with Sony shortly after Lair fell flat.

I expect them to continue strong relationships with Insomniac, Media Molecule, and probably Sucker Punch and Level 5, though I suppose the performance of InFamous will ultimately determine Sucker Punch's fate.

Eh, those were just examples of second party publishers.

I mean thinking about it.  Sony has been very loose with their money when it comes to second party funding and third party advertising.

I mean everytime a multiplat game commercial ends with "On PS3" instead of having "PS3/360/Wii" you can almost gurantee that was paid for by sony.

I know.  I was just pointing out examples of who they might cut off and who they'll probably keep working with.  :P

Blu-Ray drive royalties are $30 per drive. For reference, there were ~250 million DVD drives produced last year. Sony gets about 30% of the Blu-Ray royalty, as I recall (might be ~40%, actually). If BD drives become the standard in PCs, thats 7.5 billion USD in royalties each year, of which near 2.5 billion goes to Sony.

DVD disc royalties were about 0.075 USD per, until a few years back, where they dropped to about 0.04 USD per. I dunno what the BD royalties are, but they are probably relatively close to that. I dunno what worldwide DVD numbers are, per year, but I would wager that they are definately in the billions, and maybe in the 10s of billions. You could probably look it up at the various regional movie associations' web sites.

Blu-Ray is already approaching 10% marketshare, and growing.  We're talking billions of USD per year in royalties, here, in the very near future. (cue Carl Sagan)

Interesting. The $30 royalty per PC drive seems correct according to google. That's a lot but I imagine they'll have to lower it before these drives become common. I can't find anything for the 30% Sony portion though.

As for the discs, that doesn't seem like a lot of money compared to the drives (400-800 discs per drive at those levels).

Btw here's an interesting link about DVD royalties I just found:

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=23926

The disc manufacturing companies are huge fans of BD, mostly because of per-disc DVD royalties, I think.

6-DVD set: $ 0.24 USD. 1-BD: $0.07 USD (or whatever)

BD is a necessity for HD movies at home, and is pretty convenient if you're selling entire SD TV seasons as well (notice how much of the retail shelf space is devoted to multi-disc collections these days).  The retailers benefit as well -- they get more shelf space.