During an earnings conference call, Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato announced that PlayStation 4 will be more profitable at launch than PlayStation 3 was.
"Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4," said Kato.
"At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the Cell chip," he explained. "Development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities [as internal investments]. This time, we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate. All the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don't have to make all the investment in-house."
Console makers usually price their consoles below production cost and makeup the loss later from software sales. And PlayStation 3’s loss overhead was especially high since it included two new and expensive hardware components: the Cell processor and the Blu-Ray drive. This time around however, PlayStation 4 is powered by AMD’s conventional x86 Jaguar CPU.
Sony didn’t provide a sales forecast for PlayStation 4, but it expects the next fiscal year's total operating income in the PlayStation unit to remain in line with previous years.
