PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability

The Xbox 360 price drop rumors flow like water and it’s all but officially been announced at this point. What about PlayStation 3 and their price? No.

Nobuyuki Oneda, the Sony’s chief financial officer said, “our plan is not to reduce the price. Our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability.” (gamespot) This makes complete sense coming from their chief financial officer, as their motivation is to make money, not lose it.

The question remains, how will they actually make money if they’re no longer in the race for competitive market prices? Considering game licensing must Net them some amount of profit Sony’s idea seems to be the exact opposite of their original PlayStation method: saturate the market and sell them all games.

So far we’ve seen very few “need to have” games for the PlayStation 3 console while Xbox 360 continues to build a substantial library and Wii continues to break sales records for apparently no reason. When a game publisher has to decide on a platform to launch a new game, why would they choose the one that doesn’t care to be competitively priced in the market? The one that doesn’t care about quantity of sales?

Sony intends to reverse the entire razor blade philosophy where one sells a cheap razor and charges users for the blades over and over again. Their take on this concept is to sell really expensive razors and put out small half-quality blades. Is that a good market strategy at this point?

0 thoughts on “PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 310: Halo Makes You Feel OldEpisode 310: Halo Makes You Feel Old

This week’s podcast features a Gaming Flashback of Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the longest such game segments in the podcast’s history, encompassing a third of the podcast.

This week’s news items includes:

  • Blizzard decides against rolling back Diablo III servers following gold exploit
  • Defiance to get 5 major DLC packs in the next year
  • Report: Next-gen Xbox console called “Xbox Infinity”
  • Obsidian expresses desire to develop Star Wars RPG
  • EA to stop licensing with weapons manufacturers, will keep using branded guns

There’s only one reader response, but there is a Question of the Week: “What videogame genre are you completely burned out on?”

Episode 650: Walking SimulatorsEpisode 650: Walking Simulators

This week’s episode looks at the progenitor of all walking simulator games, Dear Esther, in this week’s Gaming Flashback. They also discuss the upcoming Game Pass games for May as well as voice masking on the Playstation 3 and Xbox. In addition, Scott discusses Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, the spinoff of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes that was crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

The news includes:

  • EA Sports officially ends FIFA partnership after 30 years of games
  • Starfield and Redfall have been delayed
  • Sony reportedly “will not approve any statements” from PlayStation studios on reproductive rights
  • Alan Wake developer Remedy provides update on five projects in pipeline

Let us know what you think.