Sony Still Losing Money On Every PS3 Sold

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While that headline may seem bad, the truth of the matter is that Sony is losing less than $40 per console these days, compared to the hundreds of dollars per unit in 2007 and 2008. So, from the looks lof things, Sony could actually start making money on the PS3 soon, unless of course they are forced to drop their prices again.

With the cost of materials continually on the decline, provided Sony can stick at a $299 price point for a while to come, you'd expect the PS3 to start generating a profit sometime next year.
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I feel really bad about this for them. I mean, how are the execs at sony supposed to be able to afford their gold-plated shark statues next to their pools now? Oh, the horror.

really, I wonder how much they make as a whole per every PS3 sold. Like total profits/# of consoles.
 
yawn bullshit radar = on.

come on... sony quit hijacking your own prices and selling it to internal groups. until they stop duing this for blue-ray they hold no credibility with pricing issues with me.

example: blue-ray costs 1$ (example)
they sell it to sony-subgroup for 10$, saying it actually costs 10$ to produce

they actually "pushed around" 9$... no justification.

now they charge the same 10$ license to other companies as themselves... makes no sense.

its like saying your pc is going to cost your company 500$. but when your department gets the bill it costs $5k due to internal pricing issues. wtf 10x markup to internal groups when costs are nill is a joke.

how do you not know they are saying the 40$ hard drive they use doesnt cost 150$ blah blah
 
LoL Think Xbox HD that cost $179
That is a $45 HDD at retail.
add some $19.99 retail hong kong plastic.

Now think, they dont pay retail either they pay bulk prices.
 
Glad i sold that PS3 when they were going for $599 the games just didn't seem fun, pretty looking but not fun. I remember being very disappointed with it and the install times are disgusting so i mostly stick with PC gaming anyways Santas shipping me a Wii this year for a mere $199.
 
Curium244 said:
Glad i sold that PS3 when they were going for $599 the games just didn't seem fun, pretty looking but not fun. I remember being very disappointed with it and the install times are disgusting so i mostly stick with PC gaming anyways Santas shipping me a Wii this year for a mere $199.
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You might want to rethink that, the GOTY and the best single player action game since Half Life 2 is Uncharted 2, a PS3 exclusive. Its been slow but the pace of excellent games on the PS3 has significantly picked up in the last year.

The Wii on the other hand, same as always, awesome first party Nintendo game comes out every 8-16 months, sometimes a cool classic game on the VC, otherwise it mostly collects dust...
 
A PS3 cost ~299 euros in Europe (or more depending on the country), which is about $430.
 
Well, if Sony would get on the ball and release a Castlevania,Contra,Tokyo Extreme Racer i may rethink my views but the developers have already said it sucks trying to program games for a PS3 then it is an Xbox360 so the hope for the PS3s future has already died.
 
Curium244 said:
Well, if Sony would get on the ball and release a Castlevania,Contra,Tokyo Extreme Racer i may rethink my views but the developers have already said it sucks trying to program games for a PS3 then it is an Xbox360 so the hope for the PS3s future has already died.
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Not really. 99% of the libraries on both systems are common crossplatform games, both downloadable via XBLA or PSN, and retail. I own both systems and its pretty safe to say that if its on one system, its going to be on the other. The exceptions are obviously exclusives like Gears, Halo, Shadow Complex, Uncharted 2, God Of War, Infamous, PixelJunk, WipeOut, and of course XBox and PS1/PS2 classics for download.

The PS3 had a rough couple years but right now its not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Its finally started to hit its stride, especially with such solid exclusives like Uncharted 2 (way better than Gears or Halo) and upcoming games like God Of War 3. Many people I know who have 360s also picked up PS3s this year because of that (and the price drop, obviously :)).
 
They started making money with the slim PS3s, this is false. The production costs are around $250 now, I don't know where these people are pulling their numbers from.
 
I think the fact that it is one of the better BluRay players, and is able to stream movies give it a boost as well.
 
Emission said:
They started making money with the slim PS3s, this is false. The production costs are around $250 now, I don't know where these people are pulling their numbers from.
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$50 is not enough markup for sony, supply chain and retail make money.

They really shouldn't have tied PS3 and Blu-ray together. Although it helped blu-ray, it's clear now that it will never be the success that DVD was, and it clearly hurt PS3 sales. The only point was practical copy protection, since nobody could afford burners and media.

What they should do at this point is produce a PS3 PCIe card and compete with gaming graphics and their computational applications. You eliminate the case, power supply, hard drive, networking, and BD drive, and (hopefully) still have "embedded" ps3 gaming.
 
freakyhair said:
I think the fact that it is one of the better BluRay players, and is able to stream movies give it a boost as well.
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You can get a Blu-ray player for your PC for under $60, so it's not worth buying a PS3 just as a player.
 
I'm pretty sure this whole "losing money on selling PS3's" is an outright lie on Sony's part. They've done so before, so it wouldn't surprise me.

However, even if they somehow DID lose money on a PS3, then they make it up en masse via PSN purchases, accessories and jacked-the-fuck-up price tags for games.
 
all ms need todo now is surprise next gen xbox (xbox 720?) for nx xmas and gg sony game division
 
BladeVenom said:
You can get a Blu-ray player for your PC for under $60, so it's not worth buying a PS3 just as a player.
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B.S. If you go the PC route you'd still need a videocard to support HDCP and a proper player to play the BD.
 
Not a lie. For many generations, consoles have been sold at a loss with the intention to make profit using software sales.

Certainly helped, I was eyeing a 360 but then the Slim arrived and definitely seemed more trustworthy and interesting and I was getting a 1080p HDCP screen my way so.. I've helped Sony lose money!

And they deserve it, those assholes who block PS3/PSP game imports for Europeans for no good reason.
 
venm11 said:
$50 is not enough markup for sony, supply chain and retail make money.

They really shouldn't have tied PS3 and Blu-ray together. Although it helped blu-ray, it's clear now that it will never be the success that DVD was, and it clearly hurt PS3 sales. The only point was practical copy protection, since nobody could afford burners and media.

What they should do at this point is produce a PS3 PCIe card and compete with gaming graphics and their computational applications. You eliminate the case, power supply, hard drive, networking, and BD drive, and (hopefully) still have "embedded" ps3 gaming.
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Except that's not a realistic concept because of the money they would be losing. A cool idea though.
 
Emission said:
Except that's not a realistic concept because of the money they would be losing. A cool idea though.
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Well, they'd gain sales from folks who are in the market for gx cards, and for computing applications, etc. There are some entitites (most recently the us army) buying the ps3 for cheap supercomputing applications. All of this drives down the manufacturing costs for everyone. If you strip out everything not necessary or redundant, you have a more efficient product. If there's demand for this unique product which saves money on redundant gaming hardware, you can boost the price. There is a question of which games they'd buy in this configuration -- the PS3 game (which makes them money) or the PC game (which doesn't -- currently).
 
That means that the PS3 games are selling like hotcakes, because that might be the only profit the PS3 is making.
 
The claim they are "losing money" is a joke. There's no way the stuff inside a PS3 costs as anywhere near what Sony is claiming. When they make a claim like that, it just further erodes any credibility they had with me, not that they had much anyway at this point in time. They are buying these parts in huge quantities, and if I went and bought similar, if not identical parts individually at retail, it wouldn't be much more than what they claim they are costing to make. What is Sony charging the stores for them?

I've had some bad experiences with Sony stuff over the last few years (mostly home theater receivers and LCD monitors), and between the bad customer service, and lack of quality control (DOA or DIAD (dead in a day) stuff I've had and seen friends have, I've pretty much stopped buying anything from them. I recently bought an HDTV, BD player, and a camcorder. I passed by the Sony stuff entirely, even though it all looked good.. I bought a Toshiba TV, and Panasonic BD player and camcorder. I've had only one dud Panasonic product in 40 years of buying their stuff, and they replaced it with only a short wait for shipping. When I sold hifi stuff, the Panasonic/echnics stuff very rarely came back for warranty work, unlike a lot of the other brands, who seemed to have soldering issues without end on some lines. There was one positive thing out of those bad joints though. I learned how to find, and fix them myself, rather than wait to ship it out, have it fixed, and sent back. Getting the customer's new toy back to them overnight made them very happy, and those skills have been very useful in fixing stuff over the years since then.
 
Kingrat said:
The claim they are "losing money" is a joke. There's no way the stuff inside a PS3 costs as anywhere near what Sony is claiming.
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Sony isn't claiming anything, the number was based on what isuppli saw in their teardowns.
Even then the number isuppli comes with is purely the cost of components, it doesn't take into account the assembly, manufacturing, and the R&D.

For all those people that think companies aren't losing money on consoles, it's time to actually read up on what's going on. There's a reason why console gaming is a loss leading market. Console makers are willing to take a loss on the console itself in order to be able to make it back from videogame sales.

If they can manufacture a console at a profit, then yay for them, but it's not the goal. The goal is to get the consumer to buy as much games as possible.
 
actually the blu-ray part was thier greatest success. blu rays are already outselling dvd's at amazon. thier adoption rate has been faster than dvd's. the key has been the less than $150 doller blu ray, and once its hit under under $100 for players it's all over. sony is going to make a lot of money from blu-ray, and no way they would have won were it not for the ps3.
 
Keiichi said:
B.S. If you go the PC route you'd still need a videocard to support HDCP and a proper player to play the BD.
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Yes, at good BD setup for a PC is going to cost a bit in software. I have ArcSoft TotalMedia 3 which is quite good but does cost $60. But I also have something that costs money called AnyDVD that runs on my PC and give me MUCH more flexibility than an console would.
 
ikarinokami said:
sony is going to make a lot of money from blu-ray...
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Yeah, that's one of Sony's best techniques. Develop a proprietary media and rip people off with it. I don't like the idea of buying a movie for $30.

Maybe I'll change my tune when I get my 1080p TV though.
 
Skillz'n Magic said:
Yeah, that's one of Sony's best techniques. Develop a proprietary media and rip people off with it. I don't like the idea of buying a movie for $30.

Maybe I'll change my tune when I get my 1080p TV though.
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As opposed to what? Open source DVDs? Ooh, or how about the free and open CDs? Oh, wait, those were both proprietary media as well - look at how they ripped people off with enforced quality control (compare consistent CD and DVD quality with VHS and Cassette tapes of old) :rolleyes:

New tech costs more money than old tech. If you don't like it, don't pay attention to the bleeding edge. Granted Blu-Ray isn't brand new tech anymore, but its price has also dropped.

MrLonghair said:
Not a lie. For many generations, consoles have been sold at a loss with the intention to make profit using software sales.
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Exactly, the console hardware is sold at a loss with some of that recouped with accessory sales. Then Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge developers to release on their platform - that is how the model works.
 
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