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Sony Finally Turning a Profit On PS3s
When the PS3 launched in 2006, estimates pegged the price of producing the consoles to be as much as $250 more than the price at which they were sold. Production costs have dropped since then, but there have been several price cuts as well. Now, almost four years later, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida says they're finally turning a profit on the hardware.
"This year is the first time that we are able to cover the cost of the PlayStation 3,' Yoshida said. 'We aren't making huge money from hardware, but we aren't bleeding like we used to.' In May, Sony began shipping new PlayStation 3 consoles with smaller and more cost-effective graphics chips. Now, Yoshida said, Sony is looking at replenishing retail stock that has been running on empty since January rather than cutting the price. 'When we bring the cost of hardware down, we are looking at opportunities to adjust prices if we believe that will increase demand,' he explained. 'At the moment, we are trying to catch up our production.'"
Why not return the features that were removed? Why not add more features? I was going to buy a PS3, but scrapped those plans when several things went out the window. How many other people are like me?
A cheaper turd is still a turd.
The old hardware's too pricy to keep making, there's not enough of the new cheap stuff so they're bleeding in new and interesting ways - not having enough product to sell is making distributors angry and their profits small. They're hoping that passing on some of the savings to some of the distributors will make them less angry. That will make their per-unit profit even smaller but they hope to compensate with volume, maybe, someday, when they are able to make enough of the damn things.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
"What's that?! Speak up! I can't hear you from this giant pool of money I'm swimming like Scrooge McDuck!"
Now, they can start not making a profit again when they ship Move!
For MS' cost-reduced 360 and its impending price cut.
That will make their per-unit profit even smaller but they hope to compensate with volume
If they make a profit on the hardware at all, they are in a better position then before.
Most of the time (and including earlier PS3), console hardware is sold at a loss to push it into the market and the vendor regains the money from game sales. The Wii was the first among the current generation consoles that broke this tradition. Now, after some cost-saving redesigns, PS3 sales also cover the cost for the hardware. I'm not sure about the present situation of the XBox 360, but when it was new it was sold at a loss too.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I remember the 90s being full of consoles:
3DO, Dreamcast, Saturn, PS1, Atari Jaguar, N64, Philips CD-i, in addition to existing ones like Genesis/SegaCD/32x and SNES which were in the prime of their lives in the early 90s.
Now the 360 has been out for five years and the PS3 has been out for four. Neither company seems interested in making new hardware anymore, which is understandable since they lost so much money working out the bugs. But it seems that nobody wants to one-up the other anymore.
Rather than pursue hardware that is clearly superior to their competitor (as many attempted in the 90s), they just blow money purchasing exclusives.
You know we can see these shelves, right?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Dear Sony (I know your a shiver corporate hivemind is lurking here)
Like to topic says, good job and congratulations on finally turning a profit on your product!
You only had to alienate a large section of your customers and potential customers. Hell you even managed to piss off The USAF, so that's something at least.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I never knew that was on Sony's mind when they lauched the ps3 ? What were they expecting, brand loyalty ?
Maybe they noticed the success of casual gaming (Wii mostly), and figured that better profits await if they can sell equipment to wider audience.
Or maybe they're gluing feathers onto their bodies and trying to fly. I wouldn't say "casual" is exactly the right word for Nintendo's strategy.
To make this profit, though, Sony had to cut a few features from consoles (retroactively for already-sold ones as well, unfortunately):
* Linux can't be used anymore (we already know about this one)
* Blu-ray playback now includes commercials every 15 minutes
* When connected to the Internet, you must allow it to be a node in a botnet, or online play will be disabled
* To save cost, gaphics are now displayed as in The Matrix, but they say you'll quickly be able to see everything in 3D with some practice
Ok, the article headline and the Slashdot headline both say "turning profit," but the article makes no statement to back this up.
From the way it reads it sounds like Sony is finally not losing money for every system that is sold. That doesn't mean that they've brought in enough income to cover the cost of developing the system, marketing it and not to mention the aggregate loss of all of the PS3s that were sold at a loss. At this stage I would expect that the Sony PS3 division is still at a net loss and probably a considerable one, but this should accelerate their income towards eventually operating in the black. However I severely doubt that they're actually profitable, yet.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong with an article that states otherwise.
I wonder how much sony makes on average per PS3 sold. I guess the bulk income must be from licensing of games and such, since the hw hasn't turned a profit until now. Are there numbers on this?
That's the risk that anyone runs by being an early adopter of any new tech. I had a similar experience with the Xbox 360 (though MS did man up and extend the original warranty). That is why I waited for a few generations to get a PS3.
Could Sony have done more product testing and developed a more reliable system? Probably. But I doubt they intentionally engineered a defect just to make money on repair services. I think Sony would be much happier if every unit they manufactured performed perfectly for the entire lifespan of the console.
If you want to play games, get a good quad or dual core PC - games are modern, more upto date and if you use Steam client, it really makes it easy to get a game updated and working. In the past PC's suffered from complications and this made games difficult to setup and play, but now graphics cards are much better and the Steam client seems to repair damaged files and update automatically.
That is a very good point. Gaming quality of PC's will always be better. Of course, the tradeoff is that you will be facing shorter upgrade cycles. Every 12-18 months you will be replacing some piece of hardware in the thing, and those costs add up. My $400 Xbox 360 has cost me $0 in upgrade in the last 5 years. My $400 PS3 has cost me nothing in the last year, and will continue to cost me nothing for years to come.
1. use conflict minerals to make playstations
2. fund warlords
3. ???
4. profit!
I was going to build a new gaming PC, but I already have MANY other PCs in my house and I thought to myself:
- Do I need another general purpose computing device?
- To make it a good gaming PC to play latest titles with decent graphics, I need to shell out at least 500 or more (add another 100-150 for a monitor, luckily I was just going to hook it to a TV)
- Can i get similar media solutions on non-PCs
The PS3, at least for me, was already designed for gaming, decent with media (and hook to media servers - like PlayOn, for example). I was able to get a new 250GB model with a free game for $350.
The advantages:
- saved 100-200 bux on what I was going to spend
- got a BluRay player (nice, wasn't a deal maker)
- Decent game library now
- Decent connectivity
- Easier to maintain than a PS3 - quieter, and a little lower profile
- Can connect to media servers (is a bit of a disadvantage too)
- Can play videos and music off any USB device (my phone, for example) and a neat photo viewer (really, it's fluff tho)
- Online gaming is free (i dont do that very much, however)
- hard drive is upgradeable without voiding warranty (and there are tools for the PS3 to backup HD contents)
Disadvantages:
- Closed system (but I just want it for gaming)
- Web browser is an absolute POS
- Online store is a bit meh
- Only built in media choices are movie rental/purchase from the PSN store (meh)
- The media server connectivity (neat, but you do need another PC to be the server, which I already had, not good for gaming, but good for a PlayOn server) - and it does have a yearly cost ($40 for first year $20 per year afterward)
- Can't upgrade anything but the harddrive - so I could be obsolete in a few years
A Year ago I was saying "I would never buy a PS3" - but I was really afraid to buy a BreakBox 360, so PS3 it was
ok, it's not the most practical solution yet, but it's GPL'd and many games are fully playable. You do need a pretty good system, but nothing too crazy. My buddy's year old gaming laptop plays FF12 at 60 FPS (off a hard disk image mind you, but really, if you're reading /. you can figure that out).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
for all the fscking 60GB units that finally overheated and died this year.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
This would be a good time then, to re-enable OtherOS again.
Universities that buy ps3 farms would no longer hurt them, but help them instead.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Except Sony's rewarded early adopters of PS3s with PS3s that do more than the current PS3 (save one feature). Launch PS3s could do backwards compatibility (it had a full PS2 inside it, unlike second revision GPU-only). It used to do Linux. It had a card reader (useful if you want to toss your photos up). 4 USB ports. The only thing it doesn't have is bitstream audio (Dolby TrueHD, DTS Master Audio), but you can just have the PS3 decode it and send it as PCM.
Late adopters get screwed. Microsoft did a more traditional thing where features were added - HDMI, smaller size with Kinect power power, etc, so people want to upgrade to it, not hang onto their old boxes till the end of time.
The only problem is, I'd be getting a 4th PS3, which drops the attach rate for me down horribly (from just under 3 to 2). My Xbox360 has a far better attach rate (20+). Even my Wii has more and I haven't played it in the past year (5+).
A month after that comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20070309.jpg