@raygun: Wii has easilly 18 games i want to buy. That's to add to the more than 18 games i already own for it.

You know, you may not notice but you just pointed out the stupidity in Sonys strategy. Since you obviously want to watch BD; if PS3 didn't have BD player in it, you had bought a BD player to go with your 16 BD:s. Now Sony sold you a BD player they made loss with, instead of selling a standalone player that had been sold at a profit. Sounds like they lost money twice with selling you the PS3.

or, they provided something that a certain demographic needed NOW, predicting this to happen 3 years ago.

Interesting way to look at it, though Sony had a lot of money invested into Blu-ray so it had to trump HD-DVD, best way to do that is offer a way for people to get a multipurpose device that is significantly better than just a HD DVD player and so a PS3 sold at a loss to customers not only let them have HD movies but games as well.  A much better investment for consumers, and in turn, a way to keep a leg up on HD-DVD.

@TheProf: They could have provided it by making profit at the same time.

you should work for sony

Panasonic is the one who really benefited from Sony's decision to put Blu Ray in the PS3 because they another significant patent holder and they didn't lose as much money getting the format onto its feet. Also its quite probable that Panasonic profited from Sony's decision as their patents are focused on the player technology itself so getting a lot of players out there is a lot of royalty payments to Panasonic whereas Sony's Blu Ray fabrication in only just approaching break even now with a LOT of money invested in plant capital which will still need to be depreciated over the coming years. Sony makes their royalty money more on selling a lot of Blu Ray discs.

As computers are moving away from Blu Ray as a medium for transfering files because online distribution and flash discs are taking off for their ease of use, they will not sell nearly in the same league the quantity of burnable write once or rewriteable discs as DVD.

So even if you say that Blu Ray was an effective part of Sony's Razor/blade strategy, they may not be the biggest winner from their own strategy.

@Maxwell: I have been pointing it out for a few years. I also made a topic about Sony not being able to drop the price of PS3 until BD players drop in price.

PS3 did affect on BD winning over the HD-DVD, so in the sense it likely did pay off in the long run. Although, we are talking about billions of discs sold and maybe even hundreds of millions of players sold, before money starts to come in (depending on how the royalties are split). But, what eventually lead to BD winning over HD-DVD was the studios choosing the platform.

Hell, the Gamecube proved that the razor/blade model is flawed.

Sony's profits in the PS2 era weren't much more than Nintendo's in the GC era (if Sony even topped that).
And PS2 is the best-selling system of all-time.

John Lucas

RolStoppable said: It really cracks me up everytime I see someone post that Nintendo doesn't care for its core audience right after they released the game of the generation.

uncharted 2? O.o.

@johnlucas

 sony only had ps2 and some ps1 sales when the gamecube hit.

nintendo had Gameboy color, gameboy advance, gamecube and software sales for all platforms for profits.

and with all that nintendo made almost the same as the ps2.

Just a quick aside, but all profits from Pokemon licensing and merchandising are reported under the Pokemon Company, not Nintendo themselves.  They do this for tax reasons iirc.

Same deal with Kirby and WarpStar Inc.  I believe the Mariners are reported as a subsidiary, and revenue from that venture isn't included in Nintendo's financials either.  Nintendo also reports iQue separately due to Chinese law.  They actually don't even include hardware or software sales from iQue in their worldwide totals.