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Originally Posted by fjtorres
He cost the company a cool billion in losses in the first year and another four since. To say nothing of blowing an entire gaming generation.
PS3 should have been a gold mine for Sony; instead, after 5 years they are barely breaking even on the hardware and still in the hole life-cycle wise.
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I don't know the details of PS3 performance in terms of profitability compared to Xbox (or even PS2) but my understanding has always been that consoles always sell at a loss for the first couple of years (because they spend so much on R&D). I have no idea, though, whether the PS3's rate or amount of losses is within what was expected.
They should be making profits on hardware, though. After significant reduction in costs of manufacturing, it
was estimated that the cost of the PS3 had fallen to about $240 per unit back in August 2009, so they've been making money on the hardware for a good two-and-a-half years now.
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The issue isn't how much hardware they've managed to ship, but what it *cost* to get that far. And the lost market share, mindshare, and developer commitments.
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True, and I specially agree with the second part. Sony has lost a lot of their exclusives in this generation, like the
Tekken,
MGS, and
Devil May Cry franchises. In fact, just looking up this info I stumbled upon
an article that reveals that Sony had the opportunity to make
GTA IV and
Assassin's Creed exclusive titles, but bungled it.