Well, according to the latest Sony financials they could well be. The technology blog has been looking at the figures which show Sony's gaming arm lost around $1.2 billion last year - an improvement from the $2.2bn loss the year before. Of course, console manufacturers, though generally not Nintendo, often suffer losses - caused by high costs/low install base - early on in a console's lifespan. Microsoft certainly did and it appears Sony are continuing the trend. Jack Schofield crunches the numbers.
"On Sony's own figures, the games division made a loss of $130 for each PlayStation 3 shipped. 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."
What do you think then? Sound like a realistic estimate?
