Of course the picture at Sony couldn't be more polarized
Well, just to clarify for you, the company itself has been in its best financial shape in years recently,
in spite of the PS3 losses. So, I question the logic that Microsoft could afford it, but Sony couldn't. It's simply a matter of scale. But a material effect, no doubt.
PS4 will be just continuation = next Cell + blu-ray + next nVidia.
Who knows what PS4 will be; a thread dedicated to just such a topic in the technology section should you wish to join it.
But certainly there's a lot of expectation that it will be a Cell continuation, and an NVidia card. As for Blu-ray, probably, but its costs (or lack thereof) for PS4 exist outside of the context of previous investment into it from an SCE standpoint.
Carl,
Taking away the PS2 and PSP profits, what would you estimate that the PS3 project in itself has cost Sony so far? Including the r&d years which are obviously costly.
(Very) hard to say, since it's educated guesses at best. Arbitrarily I'd say $4 billion, simply based on what the expectation for a PS3-free profit boost over the last three years might have resulted in, so valuing the last several years of PS2 and PSP at a little less than a billion. But the way things are silo'd across the divisions it's hard to put a direct handle on it from a corporate-level standpoint. For instance, SCE paying a lot for Cell chips and BD diodes, and that being accounted for there as a loss, but in turn helping to generate revenue over in the Sony semi division. So with this console especially there's been a lot of internal cross-accounting that's hard to get a handle on. PS3 essentially is a multi-billion BD subsidy in action, but when a lot of that money goes itself towards the build-out of the diode and replication capacities... hard to know what to say from a net perspective.
But what we
do know from the financials is that Sony wasn't recording incredible sales from diodes, semiconductors, and optical media over the last couple of years, so whatever the internal sales figures
were, the net effect was still clearly a very lossy cost structure surrounding PS3, and it would seem that the intra-division sales were made at minimal profit.
So... yeah I'll go with $4 billion, but it
is arbitrary.
Truth is that it could be a lot more based on figures like 2003's SCE profits, yet at the same time there are tangential projects at play surrounding PS3 that it wouldn't be fair to consider as a direct PS3 cost (Home, PS Network, etc..)
