That’s a staggering figure that is sure to influence how this round of the console war plays out. (In perspective, Sony will take a loss equal to the retail price of a Nintendo Wii every time it sells a PS3.)
It’s not unusual for console makers to lose money on the game console itself, expecting to make up for that by selling multiple games later. Sony and Microsoft (MSFT) both have employed that strategy in the past to get more powerful consoles into the hands of gamers.
But this time around, Microsoft will make $75.70 on every Xbox 360 it sells, not counting marketing and distribution costs. So while Microsoft won’t need to sell a set number of games to cover its build costs, Sony will have to sell five to seven. That is a high hurdle. This is corrected from an earlier version that said Microsoft will lose $75.70 on each Xbox 360. Thanks, Mike, for the catch.
(ISuppli analysts found a Seagate hard drive in the PS3, as we noted that they would.)
“The reason why the PlayStation 3 is so costly to produce is because it has incredible processing power,” said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and senior analyst for iSuppli. “If someone had shown me the PlayStation 3 motherboard from afar without telling me what it was, I would have assumed it was for a network switch or an
enterprise server.”
It may be that Sony is giving gamers incredible power for the price, but from a business standpoint it’s also taking a big financial risk. One could argue that if Sony needs to sell so many games to make a profit, its game system experience had better be orders of magnitude better than Microsoft’s.
I’ll leave it to you, good readers and commenters, to judge whether it is. In the chart below, iSuppli’s component cost breakdown. It doesn’t include the controller or the packaging.
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