Sony Makes Money At Everything - But Video Games

Japan's Sony Corporation crawled up out of the puddle of reddish ink it was dog-paddling in last year and posted a substantial profit for the last quarter. The quarterly profit news allowed Sony to raise its forecast for the year by six times last year's number. The number is based mainly on strength in LCD TVs, computers, and digital cameras; and of course there were no flaming laptop battery recalls this year to eat away at the bottom line. But Sony is still unable to make any money selling its flagship Playstation 3 gaming console and Blu-ray player.

  ...its PlayStation 3 (PS3) videogame console continued to lag Nintendo Co Ltd's hot-selling Wii, and the game division fell deep into the red as it was forced to sell the PS3 at a loss.

Sony raised its forecast for operating profit to 450 billion yen ($3.9 billion) for the year to March 2008 from 440 billion, compared with a consensus of 431.5 billion yen in a poll of 21 analysts by Reuters Estimates.


If Sony charges enough to recover their costs, no one buys it. If they cut prices, they lose even more money on increased sales. Maybe they could kidnap Master Chief, or pay EA Sports to make the cheerleaders in Madden Football look like humans to finally get their killer app. Nothing else seems to work.