PS3 losing lots of dough

Sony's financial results recently announced that the company had reduced its yearly losses by over 100 million yen in the last fiscal year, this drop largely being down to the falling production costs of the PS3. However, Jack Schofield at the Guardian speculates that the platform holder may be losing double the $130 per console shipped that its internal figures suggest.

"On Sony's own figures, the games division made a loss of $130 for each PlayStation 3 shipped," he said. "Let's assume that it's making pots of money on the PSP and the PlayStation 2: the PS2 is now hugely profitable and still sells more games than anything else. These two platforms could easily have made a profit of $1.2bn in the year. In that case, the total PS3 loss would have been $2.4bn shared between 9.24m PS3 consoles, or $260 per PS3 - including any attached Sony games."

Whilst the true loss on each console is still unclear, the fact that Sony are still making such a staggering loss on each console has severely knocked the chances of the Playstation 3 seeing a price cut in 2008.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter recently told Next-Gen that he expects Sony to introduce a PS3 price cut late this year when hardware production costs have slimmed to nearer the system's wholesale price.

Whilst a price cut would be great, the ps3 isn't exactly desperate for one now, the PS2 is still a prominent force in the industry and the Sony brand name is still helping Sony to shift consoles. If a price cut is to be seen in 2008 you can bet your house on it being near Christmas. Still, the question remains why European gamers are paying twice as much for the console as US and Japanese games.

Source: CVG