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Sony making a profit on the sale of the UK PS3?

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We all know that consoles historically lose money on the hardware for the first few years and the companies then make the money back from software sales.

Noxibox made a comment over at the MyADSL.co.za forums about whether or not Sony is making a profit on European PS3’s. Now I don’t have enough info to check all of Europe so I went straight to the UK price lists and worked from there. As we know they are the most expensive.

According to a report on Engadget.com in November last year Sony was losing $241.35 on every premium edition PS3 sold in the US. The premium edition is the only one that is available in the UK and here if you remember.

The Premium costs £425 in the UK which at the current exchange rate of 1.97 to the $ works out to $837.25.

The Premium sells for $599 in the states so add to that the $241.35 loss and you get $840.35…. So no Sony are still making a $3.10 loss.

But wait, didn’t Sony removed the Emotion Engine chip from the PAL release? According to Sony this was done to save costs, I have no idea how much they saved but you can bet your house on the fact that it saved them more than $3.

So while Sony loses money hand over fist for every unit sold in Japan or the US, they are making it back with a ludicrous mark up in the UK.

We should count our lucky stars that we don’t live in the UK and are not getting ripped off like that. Ours only costs us R6199 and with the current exchange rate being R7.27 to the dollar that works out to only be $852.68.

um that would be $15 more than the UK version?

Last Updated: April 2, 2007

7 Comments

  1. Supes

    April 2, 2007 at 14:57

    I may be wrong on this but since seeing the PS3 isn’t manufactured in Europe it has to be imported from the US or Japan or where ever and thus Sony needs to pay extra taxes on it, hence the higher price.

    Just my thinking

    Reply

  2. LazySAGamer

    April 2, 2007 at 15:06

    Unfortunately that logic does not hold up since it has to be imported into the States and Japan as well since it is manufactured in Taiwan.

    Granted there are different tax rates and all that but the price difference is huge between the PAL and NTSC version.

    (Copy to 🙂 )

    Reply

  3. vanmartin

    April 2, 2007 at 16:59

    What exactly is the Emotion Engine chip utilised for?

    Reply

  4. LazySAGamer

    April 2, 2007 at 21:13

    The Emotion Engine chip was the piece of hardware that made the PS3 100% backwards compatible. Basically it is the brain of the PS2 that is included in the PS3 in NTSC regions but was removed for the PAL release.

    Now the backward compatibility is controlled through software emulation as it is in the Xbox 360 . Software emulation works, but each title needs to be tested and tweaked to work independently, obviously this leads to problems with the lesser selling titles not being backward compatible.

    Reply

  5. DC

    April 3, 2007 at 03:53

    Here’s an estimate of the cost of the PS3’s Emotion Engine. http://www.playfuls.com/news_06339_How_Sony_Killed_the_PlayStation3_and_NOT_Just_in_Europe.html

    It costs around $27. So Sony stands to make $24 from taking the Emotion Engine out but the cost bill of the consoles exclude the controller, power adapters etc so I guess Sony is still making a loss in Europe.

    Reply

  6. suna

    April 12, 2007 at 16:03

    LazySAGamer, you readers are silly twats. “What exactly is the Emotion Engine chip utilised for?” I mean really.

    Reply

  7. mike

    July 19, 2007 at 23:10

    If you guys are interested, I can hook you up with some PS3/Wii deals 😉 I know some people that travel often back and forth from the States to SA (if you know what I mean)

    Reply

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