"PS3 estimated to bankrupt 80% of the worlds population

[Gamelver]

it costs a lot of money to develop a game, you know ....especially good ones!

[Radon199]

Ya but even if the game cost $1 million to make (of which it dosn't) the fee per disk on a game that sells 6 million copys (Figure taken from FFX) is still only gonna be $0.16 cents a game. Now advisably Sony pays the company their 1 mill and then takes say $10 off per game for the first 100 000 copys and then after that they don't put a developer fee on the game and they only have to pay for the DVDs.

[benheck]

Radon, no game that cost 1 million sells 6 million copies these days. Games cost a lot more than that.

Yeah, looking at the cost of each part in a PS3 is kind of like the myth (and yes, I said myth) of "building your own computer is cheaper" With electronics the whole is worth LESS than the sum of its parts. And they say $80 for the assorted various IC's on the PS3? Please.

I can't stress enough how dumb $350 for a Blu-Ray is. Hell, that's probably the cost of a Blu-Ray standalone PLAYER (DVD players started in that price range) but somehow they've worked it into the PS3 price.

Don't count Sony out. Yes, people rag on about the price of making a game (and how it goes up with these next-gen systems) but they said the same thing about PS2, and games still cost WAY less to make than movies. But they make more money! Where's the problem here? Quick math:

A Halo, or GTA level game: $7-$10 million to make.

Sells 10 million copies, times 50 bucks = HALF A BILLION DOLLARS.

Net profit: $490 million (Granted there's license costs, store markup, but still)

[teraflop122]

Is it just me, or is something missing from all this math? Oh, yeah:

The game studios sure as heck don't give away 99% of their profits to Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. EA games, for instance, isn't going to make a game for 10 million, take another 10 million in profit, and then let Sony absorb 480 million dollars, people. I'm not saying that Sony will lose money- no successful corporate venture ever causes a net loss, except maybe in the shrouded view of the consumer- but we can't try to sum up the entire economics of such a massive company using just a couple of factors! Sony will make money, someway, somehow, using methods that us mere mortals can't concieve or even grasp.

[vb_master]

Let's see MS looses lots of money on the XBox 360 (and even the XBox). The Microsoft developed games should be where all the real money comes, right?

[Sparkfist]

Let's see MS looses lots of money on the XBox 360 (and even the XBox). The Microsoft developed games should be where all the real money comes, right?

Maybe a good portion. It's just really the large amount of money is coming from licensing of games. Just think of the number of games that were released for the PS2, now think of this way about $5 of that before the store markup goes to Sony for every copy. Or just about 10% of all sales, that's a lot. Please note that these are not real figures just a example.

It's known that all console makers take a hit for the hardware when they sell it. But that loss is made up with interest in games. It's esspeally a lose for a company like Sony, they used a custom chip for the PS2 and doing the same for the PS3. Microsoft and Nintendo are not as bad as many of the chip that go into their systems are store, or modified by the graphics chip manufacture (think ATI and nVidea).

[Wayne Venomous]

I personally think licences make up a huge part of the profits for any large "entertainment" company. When I worked for a cable TV company, I was quite amazed to find that Sky TV don't actually make much profit directly from subscribers. They make nearly all their profit from wholesale - i.e. selling on service to cable TV companies.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the PS3 is launched in the UK. We've already got a bit of a reputation for being a nation of pirating. The psychology of the UK buying public has always been down to one thing - cost! And it always seems to be "I know a man who can get you **** much cheaper". I regularly see people walking around with what looks like Gucci bags - but they usually have a Netto bag in the other hand. They certainly wouldn't be able to afford a real one so they have a fake.
Same with games consoles, the amount of times I'm asked if I can "chip" someone's Xbox or PS2 so they can play pirated games is ridiculous.

I used to work for a local police admin office and if you think they'd be against pirate DVDs, it was quite the opposite - every friday afternoon was "cheap DVD time" where a local guy would come in with a suitcase full of pirate DVDs and PS2 games!

[Sir Games-A-Lot]

Wow, is it just me or are the next gen wars sounding just like the 32/64 bit wars?

I mean think about it, first comes the reasonably powerful early release machine with a fairly huge price tag (XB360/Saturn), then its low powered competitor (PS1/Rev.), and finaly almost a year later the uber-powerful super console (N64/PS3) using an off-beat meadia type (Blu-ray/Cart.).

Oh-well maybe I just rambling insanely but who knows?

[Sparkfist]

Yeah it might have simalarities to the 32/64 bit era. The big difference is that the Saturn never took off outside of Japan (or is it that it just failed in U.S.?), Playstaion was just easier to program for (Xbox360/Rev) and the N64... for all it's power it just didn't have the game length (fix with the PS3).

I guess if you had to stick to the comparison that's even on it's head. BlueRay if it successed, will give you twice the game play/cinima that a dual layered DVD could offer. I also don't know much in the way of the Cell processor, that is, is it a RISC or a CISC or a mix of the two? I will say that as the Xbox360 and Revolution will be using PPC G5 cpus they will be really easy to program for, after all they ar RISC chips.

Really the only thing that really has me interested in the new line up of consoles are the ablity to run Unix/Linux. Free60.org (from the people that brought you xbox-linux.org) is working to port Darwin (base of OS X) and Linux to the console. A cheap and fast G5 computer what could you as for more of? The PS3 has been mentioned as having linux installed. If you can use that sucker as a full on computer, I'd be in heaven. I'd have a new Cell processor computer to work on and learn how that works, and I'd have an under $300 G5 computer.