"Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4." - Masaru Kato, Sony Chief Financial Officer
Major video game console launches are often tied to financial losses due to major investment. But in an earnings call today, Sony said its upcoming PlayStation 4 launch will have a smaller negative impact when compared to PS3.
"At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the chip, the Cell chip," says Masaru Kato. "[For the PS4] we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate and also product investment, and all the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don't have to make all the investment in-house."
As Gamasutra previously reported, Sony's game sales were down 12.2 percent in the last fiscal year, but its overall enterprise turned a profit of $435 million - in line with projections and despite having come off a record loss in the year prior.
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That doesn't depend on faith and will, it depends on the price of the console and the launch lineup.
A lesson learned from the Wii U. Don't wait till the last minute to announce the price points!
I don't get comments like this. They have absolutely no factual basis, and get two thumbs up.
This time around they get to piggy-back existing manufacturing and production avenues and let partners like AMD/ATI handle the headache, using existing (yes, modified) technologies that have already entered production at third-party facilities.
Not to mention greatly reduced form factors in the chipset.
You must be very optimist to believe that PS3's $600 price tag was a profitable price.
The fact, that the PS3 used a custom CPU and the PS4 not isn't enough to justify the idea, that the PS4 will be more cost efficient for Sony. Just look at generation before the PS3. While the PS2 featured a custom 64 Bit GPU and a custom CPU licensesed from MIPS but built by Sony, Microsoft only used PC hardware, a NVIDIA GPU and a Intel CPU, none of these parts were manufactured by MS, but the loss MS took on every console was gigantic.