Sony's wider problems heap pressure on PS4

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The pressure on PlayStation 4 to perform this Christmas is high, as a bad quarter scythed Sony's annual profit forecasts by 40 per cent.

Sony hopes PS4 will "contribute to profitability from an early stage by diversifying its revenue streams through various network services centred on the PSN and by offering rich user experiences".

In other words: PlayStation Plus subscriptions and PlayStation Store sales. And, backing that up, is cloud gaming service Gaikai, expected to roll out next year.

Oh, and there definitely wasn't a hyphen between "rich" and "user", so no need for a second job just yet.

At the Tokyo Game Show in September Sony Japan executive Masayasu Ito told Eurogamer PS4 hardware will make a loss at launch, but Sony expects to immediately recoup the costs when a typical user also buys a PlayStation Plus subscription and games.

All-in-all, Sony expects a 30 billion yen profit (£190 million) by the end of March 2014, whereas last year it made 43 billion yen (£273 million).

The underachiever of this particular second quarter was Sony Pictures, which bet on Channing Tatum film White House Down and lost. Mind you, its "theatrical underperformance" wouldn't have been as noticeable had The Amazing Spider-Man not done so well the year before.

Pictures lost 17.8 billion yen (-£113 million) during the quarter compared to a profit of 7.9 billion yen (£50 million) the year before, edging the company's overall quarterly loss down to 19.3 billion yen (-£123 million).

Microsoft, on the other hand, recently posted a quarterly profit of $5.24 billion (£3.27 billion).

Sony's Game business, meanwhile, was relatively flat, posting a minuscule loss of 0.8 billion yen (-£5 million) compared to a profit of 2.3 billion yen (14.6 million) a year earlier.

Why? That PlayStation Vita price cut, although console sales were also down across the board.

PS3 and PS2 combined to sell 2 million consoles compared to 3.5 million the year before, and PSP and Vita sales halved from 1.6 million to 0.8 million.

So, PS4 to the rescue! And it's included in the year-end sales forecast: 15 million combined PS4, PS3 and PS2 sales. Last year, though, Sony sold 16.5 million PS2 and PS3s.

But the emphasis is on game sales, which are expected to be up to 360 million by the end of the year, compared to 266 million a year earlier.
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-10-31-sonys-wider-problems-heap-pressure-on-ps4
 
The gaming market with just Nintendo and SEGA worked. The market without one of the current 3? Probably wouldn't work IMO.
 
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Man I hope Sony stays in the game. It's good even for "Xbox only" console heads for sony to stay competitive. As much as pro Xbox people hate the Playstation brand they still need them to stay there duking it out with the Xbox brand.

That's where creativity comes from, from the competition. Without competition the Xbox will probably become like the iPhone.

"Oh hey look it's the new Iphone 7!!"

"OMG! What's new?"

"Oh nothing it only says 7 instead of 6!"

"OMGWZZZZ!"

*creams pants*
 
While I am an Xbox fan I would not want Sony to fail, the last thing I want is a Microsoft driven monopoly in core gaming...competition is king, the console wars are pointless
 
Playstation has been in the black for a while, and outside of mobile phones is really one of Sony's most promising brands.

It's their TV / home entertainment business that has really been hurting for profits.. particularly TV.

I still wonder how they'll actually "profit" from Gaikai. Those services are a huge money sink compared to what they offer.. and I am just not seeing why anyone would want to run a rendering farm that will have a sub-par experience just to offer old games on a new system.
 
BunzHoles said:
Playstation has been in the black for a while, and outside of mobile phones is really one of Sony's most promising brands.

It's their TV / home entertainment business that has really been hurting for profits.. particularly TV.

I still wonder how they'll actually "profit" from Gaikai. Those services are a huge money sink compared to what they offer.. and I am just not seeing why anyone would want to run a rendering farm that will have a sub-par experience just to offer old games on a new system.
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Is that all Gaikai will be doing though ? I got the impression they will be doing more than just Playstation game streaming.
 
They have mention Gaikai could eventually stream games to phones, Blu-ray players, PCs, Tvs, and consoles. Also, i thought i heard they were researching streaming TV and Movie content as well thru the service. In short, they seem to have a bigger goal than just PS3 games on the PS4.

Link mentions the first sentence i described.
http://www.polygon.com/2013/9/23/47...m-playstation-games-pc-tv-tablets-smartphones
 
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Wasn't really my point that it's "all they are doing with it." Point is that it's expensive.. doing more with it is.. that much more expensive.

By the time they get around to having anything but 8 year old games running on Gaikai, how much will a PS4 cost?

Why not just sell people PS4's and let them use their PS4 as their own personal streaming server? Especially if you can sell other tie-in devices like the Vita TV. And never have to run a server for 100's of hours and eat up terabytes of bandwidth so that I can play the next Elder Scrolls game on their system ;)

Same with the idea of streaming to tablets. Tablets that can now natively run pretty impressive games.
 
BunzHoles said:
Wasn't really my point that it's "all they are doing with it." Point is that it's expensive.. doing more with it is.. that much more expensive.

By the time they get around to having anything but 8 year old games running on Gaikai, how much will a PS4 cost?

Why not just sell people PS4's and let them use their PS4 as their own personal streaming server? Especially if you can sell other tie-in devices like the Vita TV. And never have to run a server for 100's of hours and eat up terabytes of bandwidth so that I can play the next Elder Scrolls game on their system ;)

Same with the idea of streaming to tablets. Tablets that can now natively run pretty impressive games.
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I understood your initial point, but figured while expensive the more stuff they can do the higher chance of profitability.

MS azure would also be expensive would it not ? It is a similar thing, yes ? Such things are obviously expensive, but they wouldn't be doing them if they didn't think there was a way to make money directly from them. Especially in Sony's case with all the financial trouble they have been in recently. Plus, the more they can do with that one service the high potential for money. Like MS with Azure, it isn't just for gaming, it is for a vast number of things. Perhaps Sony will be doing similar.
 
menace-uk- said:
MS azure would also be expensive would it not ? It is a similar thing, yes ?
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Things like Azure are part of my point.. running a dedicated BF4 game server for 64 people takes WAAAAYYYYY less power than rendering those same 64 people's BF4 graphics.

Literally thousands of times as "expensive" resource wise.

And dedicated game servers are probably the most intensive thing that will be done on Azure.. little "cloud based gaming" augmentations will use even fewer resources.

Such things are obviously expensive, but they wouldn't be doing them if they didn't think there was a way to make money directly from them.
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Companies make bad investments all the time.
 
I'm not much of a PlayStation fan anymore but yeah. Competition is a good thing so i don't want to see Sony get snuffed out of the business.
 
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