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Guardien blogger Jack Schofield commented a year ago... "Still, the expectation that Sony will lose $1 billion on the PS3 in the first year may turn out to be low." And as BusinessWeek has now pointed out, "Sony's gaming division has just lost $848 million -- double the figure from last year -- and first-half losses reached $1.1 billion."
In a statement, Sony said:
Quote:
In the game segment, operating loss increased primarily due to the loss arising from strategic pricing of PS3 at points lower than its production cost and the increase in PS3-related inventory write-downs recorded during the current quarter compared to the same quarter of the previous year.
In other words, while it had planned to sell the PS3 at a loss, Sony had to reduce prices and sell at even more of a loss in order to shift consoles it had already made.
Gamasutra has rounded up the numbers for gaming division. It says:
Quote:
In addition, specific hardware and software numbers were given for PS3, PS2, and PSP hardware compared to the previous year. Interestingly, Sony has changed its method of gathering these numbers "from production shipments to recorded sales", as from June 2007, for unspecified reasons possibly related to a surfeit of PS3 hardware in stores.
Nonetheless, the numbers given are as follows: PS2 worldwide hardware sales for the quarter at 3.28 million, down 0.13 million year on year; PSP worldwide hardware sales at 2.58 million, down 0.56 million; and PS3 sales at 1.31 million.
As for worldwide software sales, the PlayStation 2 saw total sales from all first and third-parties of 38.0 million units, down 9.2 million year-on-year (bearing in mind the difference in collection methods). The PSP had software sales of 12.6 million units, down 0.6 million, and the PlayStation 3 had sales of 10.3 million software units.
Seems to me the PS2 is still doing amazingly well for a seven year old machine.
As The Guardian has already reported, the rest of Sony is also doing well. See: Sony profits up despite PS3 losses and on Guardian Gamesbog, Sony announces big profits - no thanks to PS3.
It used to be that PlayStation propped up Sony's troubled consumer electronics division - now it's the other way around. The company has just announced that its net profits for the three months ending September 30 were 73.7 billion yen, or £315 million. The New York Times says that's a 43-fold increase on last year.