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So, hmmm, I wonder how the recent price drop and relative fire sale pricing on the Playstation 3 will affect the next quarter's reports?
Slow PS3 Sales Drove Sony's Game Division to a Loss
Sony's game division posted a quarterly loss of $237 million due to slow PS3 sales.
GamePro Staff
As expected, Sony's game division posted a quarterly loss of US$237 million on Thursday off costly and slow PS3 sales.
Despite the losses, quarterly revenues were up 60 percent due to continued PS2 sales and a price reduction of the PSP. The company said that more than 70 percent of sales were on hardware and accessories.
... more at linked article (headline above is linked)
Actually in the rest of the article there's some hope that Sony can 'right the ship' a bit due to lowering of manufacturing costs and other similar potentials savings and gains. And, as I posit above, there's the possibility that all of the hardware that was flying off the shelves after the recent price drop/clearance pricing of the existing 60GB units may help lead to more sales of software, accessories, and perhaps even some Blu-ray discs (though for those that bought recently there were 5 free discs available, so it may not actually bring that many sales of discs for a while).
Sony is definitely struggling with this generation in the console wars, but it's also still very early in the fight and I would definitely not count them out. They had a big lead in the earlier generations (Playstation and Playstation 2) when Microsoft hadn't yet developed the Xbox and then hadn't yet released it. They are actually still selling plenty of Playstation 2 hardware (at least according to recent reports I read) and definitely selling plenty of software like Guitar Hero. That could hurt them for a while as gamers lag behind somewhat waiting for further price drops to appear while they continue playing on the last generation of hardware. But, over time, Sony is likely to be very, very competitive in the gaming market and they'll probably give Microsoft everything they can ever hope to handle in the multi-billion dollar gaming market.
