Is PSN not self-sufficient? Isn't PSN expected to have $500 million revenue this year (or maybe next year)? Surely Sony sees enough of that to cover dedicated servers for games, the store, downloads etc. Resources for game developers: Wouldn't that eventually come back as profit on the games in the future (so, KZ2's profits would be covering the resources for GT5, which would cover KZ3 etc...obviously not directly like that, but in effect). R&D would be extremely expensive yes, but what would Sony be R&Ding right now that would be costing $10s of millions per week? And advertising, I include that in marketing, which brings me back to one my main questions: Is the advertising *that* high?

Edit: Typo in opening sentence (Is PSN not self sufficient originally said "If PSN")

You aren't taking R&D into account ither which is expensive.

haha well said

You're forgetting the money Sony spends on advertising, the money they pay their employees, the money they lose on the high failure rate of the console, tax, and the loads of money they lose because of the low currency exchange rate of the weak yen.

Not to mention the fact that you chose to use a week that was inflated due to natural holiday increases, which is by all means *not* an average week for Sony.

Besides that, yes, Sony should be turning profits soon, but it will be awhile (if ever) before Sony makes up for the massive losses that the PS3 has posted so far.

"We'll drive down our share price so that...um...we can just bring it back to where it used to be before!"

Not to mention being illegal and would result in Sony being fined and have many executives going to jail.

There will probably be one more maybe 2 REALLY big loss quarters for Sony and then it will either be minor loss or minor profit in their games division.

Not only did it cost a shitton of money to redesign the PS3 slim, they still lose a pretty big chunk of change with each console sold. As for the profits on the software end, I don't think its near what a lot of people think it is. Like it or not the majority of the time it takes longer to develop and ship a game for the ps3. All of that takes a lot of money and sony has a lot of software houses that they have to maintain payroll no matter if they have recently released a game or not.

Take into account that the longer development process and then the fact that a lot of software companies are losing a hell of a lot of money on their own or going under(not first party). Its easy to see that profit lines are not as good as they once were in the PS2's hayday.

obviously they are doing it in preparation of doing some serious insider trading. Their own corporate members will buy stock at rock bottom prices and then sell them and record profit, making Sony the richest compay in the world!!!

Additionally you are forgetting about exchange rate, Sony is losing somewhere between 15-30% of revenue on exchange rates. They COULD just hold all the revenue from American sales in America until the money matches up more similarly, but then they wouldn't have very much capital to work with. It is possible that they are doing this and claiming the 15-30% as a loss, but I really doubt it.

The revenue thing:

All that tells us is that PSN brings in alot of revenue. We don't know if this revenue covers the bill.

R&D:

How would I know? Companies like SONY, MS, Nintendo etc. ALWAYS have stuff in R&D. Alot of it just never sees the light of day. I'm willing to bet the PS wand would have been scratched if the Wii wasn't as successful as it is [it's been in development from ATLEAST 2004 so I'm pretty sure it was canned at one point until the Wii did what it did]. Also, they're ALWAYS working and looking at what they're going to do for the next installment of console HW.