Playstation 3 is a Suicide Mission
December 14th 2006 01:50
Category: No Category
Sony isn’t expecting to profit directly from the Playstation 3, don’t agree with me? Think it will make Sony big bucks?
Let’s look at it objectively…
It costs Sony $805 and $840 US to manufacture the 20gigabyte and 60gigabyte Playstation 3’s losing about $306 and $241 (respectively). This is nothing (too) alarming, traditionally videogame consoles lose money per console sold. It is expected to be made up via videogame sales. Even Microsoft loses about $75 per 20gigabyte Xbox 360 sold (they don’t have a 60gigabyte version of the console).
While purely speculation it appears Sony will have to sell approximately three to five times the amount of games as the Xbox 360 will have to in order to create a profit for each console.
An analyst predicts there needs to be at least thirty games sold per Playstation 3 console for Sony to recoup losses directly from the Playstation 3. Compare this to only eight games that needed to be bought for every Playstation 2 sold… yikes.
Initial sales figures show that there is a 1.5 game attach rate per Playstation 3 sold, that is, on average there are one to two games sold per Playstation 3 console, sometimes none. Zilch, nada, in fact when the Playstation 3 launched in Japan the attachment rate was around 0.82, that is, fewer games were sold than consoles.
Will Sony make it to the 30 games per console ‘target’? Well at US $60 a pop, that means every person who buys one will need to invest a further $1800 US just on games. I doubt many people are willing to go that far, thirty games is quite a bit.
Clearly Sony is not in good position to make up for the losses in five, or even eight years time with the typical sales of games. Sony isn’t stupid though, they have their reasons for this, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the Playstation 3 as it is.
So is the Playstation 3 a suicide mission? Well most likely, yes it is. I mean the loss is so great, they simply won’t recoup any of it anytime soon, it’s just that simple.
Heck, if Bill Gates really wants to finish off Sony, he may as well spend his fortunes on buying every single Playstation 3 console manufactured, he’ll run Sony out of business within a month or a week...
Maybe the purpose of the Playstation 3 isn’t to make Sony’s game division any more profitable, maybe it has a different purpose.
What purpose? To sell Blu-Ray, the next-gen DVD format and CELL, the CPU concept the two primary technologies behind the Playstation 3 (also the massive fan that cools it, can’t forget that). Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, and that monkey could be George Bush but isn’t it obvious? Friggin history repeats, well it might be ancient history, Greek mythology history, but the point is that it repeated.
Let’s look at it objectively…
It costs Sony $805 and $840 US to manufacture the 20gigabyte and 60gigabyte Playstation 3’s losing about $306 and $241 (respectively). This is nothing (too) alarming, traditionally videogame consoles lose money per console sold. It is expected to be made up via videogame sales. Even Microsoft loses about $75 per 20gigabyte Xbox 360 sold (they don’t have a 60gigabyte version of the console).
While purely speculation it appears Sony will have to sell approximately three to five times the amount of games as the Xbox 360 will have to in order to create a profit for each console.
OMG he jumped!
Initial sales figures show that there is a 1.5 game attach rate per Playstation 3 sold, that is, on average there are one to two games sold per Playstation 3 console, sometimes none. Zilch, nada, in fact when the Playstation 3 launched in Japan the attachment rate was around 0.82, that is, fewer games were sold than consoles.
Will Sony make it to the 30 games per console ‘target’? Well at US $60 a pop, that means every person who buys one will need to invest a further $1800 US just on games. I doubt many people are willing to go that far, thirty games is quite a bit.
Clearly Sony is not in good position to make up for the losses in five, or even eight years time with the typical sales of games. Sony isn’t stupid though, they have their reasons for this, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the Playstation 3 as it is.
So is the Playstation 3 a suicide mission? Well most likely, yes it is. I mean the loss is so great, they simply won’t recoup any of it anytime soon, it’s just that simple.
Heck, if Bill Gates really wants to finish off Sony, he may as well spend his fortunes on buying every single Playstation 3 console manufactured, he’ll run Sony out of business within a month or a week...
Maybe the purpose of the Playstation 3 isn’t to make Sony’s game division any more profitable, maybe it has a different purpose.
What purpose? To sell Blu-Ray, the next-gen DVD format and CELL, the CPU concept the two primary technologies behind the Playstation 3 (also the massive fan that cools it, can’t forget that). Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, and that monkey could be George Bush but isn’t it obvious? Friggin history repeats, well it might be ancient history, Greek mythology history, but the point is that it repeated.
| 147 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
jkund17
Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
after all, holographic disks? Yes, please!
Comment by Justin
Comment by Nina
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
We'll have to see, historically speaking format wars seem to always go to the technoligically inferior choice, in this case HD-DVD...
Comment by Stanley
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
Comment by Jay
Comment by Sword Serenity
A Female Gamer
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
ANyway, you might get lucky jay and nab one on the cheap off ebay, one ps3 sold for (get this) $2.50c! another for $1
Comment by Sword Serenity
A Female Gamer
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
Comment by Jay
Comment by JoshZ
A Simple Christian
These kind of wars are always interesting.
JZ
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
Comment by Jay
I was gutted when GTA came out on the XBox - how dare they sell themselves so cheap to the Microsoft whores?!? Not that I have anything against the XBox per se - it's the Microsoft whores I don't like much...
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
Well theysold out cos microsoft paid out, if Sony doesn't fihgt to keep exclusives they lose them, they already have lost a few more exclusives of lesser profile games. If MGS is lost though I think that would be it.
They already have two other RPG's for the xbox 360 that equates to one final fantasy I think (Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey) both made by the creator of Final Fantasy.
Comment by Jay
They have both made my life hell - Microsoft through Internet Explorer's gotchas and Sony through their VAIO, one of which I bought in a weak moment! It was incredibly over-priced and has turned out to be entirely fallible - I've already had the hard-disk replaced once and I've just formatted it again to remove all the rubbish that Sony put on it, presumably to slow the processor to a crawl. Time again = MacBook...
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
Comment by Jay
Comment by charles
ZCars
Ponderous
I'm a big fan of Jap anime games and the other consoles out there just doesn't offer the titles that PS3 does (or will do).
Charles.
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
A lot of japanese developed games are also going cross platform, some are lesser profile like fatal intertia and bladestorm
The 360 also is getting two exclusive RPG's from the creator of the final fantasy series, that has got to amount to something. They're Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey
.
Tamasoft is also making games for the 360 now with Onechanbara: vorteX, there are other japanese dev's microsoft is erm... paying to make games for the 360...
Comment by charles
ZCars
Ponderous
I still prefer the game-play of GT over Forza, for which I had played briefly. Splinter Cell isn't a patch on MGS imo.
I had heard rumours that the Winning Eleven series was going to be a limited release on the 360 platform - as in we don't know if subsequent and newer versions of it will be released on the 360 or not.
Is that true at all?
Charles.
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Cinema Three
There are rumours floating that MGS/ff13 will go 360 cross platform, but don't get your hopes up, not by a long shot.
Anyway, as for rumours, well think about it from the developers perspective, will they want to just release one version of it to a console and leave it at that? I'm betting on more releases coming for the 360 as with the ps3.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
Forget about time and all that irrelevant business.