It has been a tough 2011 for Japanese companies, but there's some good news for Sony.
After falling 4.5% on the heels of the PlayStation Network attack last week, Sony shares rebounded in early trade on Monday, rising 2%. Most attribute this rise to the recent news that some PSN services would be returning this week; that includes account management options, the Friends list, MediaGo, PlayStation Home, and other features. Sony came under early fire for not coming clean on the security breach early enough; this is similar to how the Tokyo Electric Power Co. handled the recent nuclear crisis after the March 11 earthquake. Many said they weren't up-front with the public in that situation, either.
Hopefully, Japan will have a much better second half of the year; they've had their fair share of bad luck. And yes, we're aware this attack happened at their San Diego branch. But Sony remains a Japanese company at heart.
Get well soon Japan and hopefully Sony.
Indeed.
I'm hopeful that this will be the end of these problems for Sony. I think overall they are a great company, they make good products and I don't like seeing them get bashed for crap beyond their control.
Off topic: bin Laden is confirmed dead
That can never be considered 'off-topic', in my opinion. More important than Sony's stock .
Last edited by PorkChopGamer on 5/1/2011 10:00:59 PM
Well at least we can stop looking for him. Thanks for the good news.
Good news all around today. I killed him with my thoughts.
U.S. Special Forces FTW!
Hmmmm,
We've just gotten the "wedding of the decade" & the "death of the decade" within the same 24 hours.
U.S. Special Forces Ops fatality > bin laden
Agreed PorkChop
Friedrich Nietzsche once said "What doesn't kill you would only make you stronger." So yes, I would continue using the PSN even after the hacking debacle. It's the first time it happened to Sony, after all. I'm pretty sure that they would not make it that easy for the hackers to bring down the PSN again.
Clarify " this week " please?
between monday and saturday
Here's to Sony's stock reaching an all-time high. Sorry, it's Sunday night and I can only toast a glass of tea.
tea bagger
LOL.
Good news to hear.
After a conversation with a friend of mine who is pro-Microsoft (and a very good public speaker) he made some points that made me a little fearful for the future of Sony 10 years from now.
One point was falling share prices due to Sony's handling of the Network attack. This piece of news completely clears that.
Another point he made was the black hole that is Sony's gaming division. While PS3's are finally turning a small profit now that production costs are finally lower than selling price, Sony continues to lose some money supporting a free network and loses HUGE amounts of money on game and movie studios having bigger production values than what sales can cover. He used Gran Turismo 5 as an example of this, stating that for Sony to break even on the amount of money that went into making the greatest racing game this gen, over 35 million sales of the game were needed in the first year, which is just absurd!!
Not only that, but with Xbox being owned by Microsoft, and MS making billions off Windows 7 and MS Office 2010, Xbox is a big money-maker, especially since all those poor ignorant people are forced to pay for online gaming.
Not only that, but the 360 is such a cheap console using old tech that MS is making nearly 60% profit on every console sold AND the same with Kinect!! Kinect is sold here in Australia for $199 AUD and apparently it only costs something like $55 – $65 AUD to produce!!!
So, while Sony has been putting technology first and successfully wowing consumers with incredible tech as their main goal, they've been losing money in the process, a LOT of money. And my friend mentioned that this attack on PSN will put a major dent in operations for Sony, and tried to argue MS' dominance in the next generation. I just asked him, how many AAA exclusive titles are created by Microsoft studios? How much third party support does MS receive exclusively compared to Sony?
…. he then tried to change the subject.
See, here's what I gathered from our argument. Sony is a long-term, forward thinking company who focus on earning profits on their products over a ten year period compared to MS or Nintendo's Wii who only looks at 4-5 year windows of profit.
Sony and the PS3 are so far ahead of the competition in terms of tech performance, it takes twice as long for full market penetration seeing as price is the only barrier. The PS3 is the perfect example of this. Once the price was reduced, the barrier fell and PS3's sold like hotcakes. Only problem is the cost and time constraints for the production of the PS3's central processing chip which is made of rarer or more delicate but higher performing materials than what the competition uses.
Either way, Sony are going to recover from this PSN attack, I hardly believe the biased "surveys" than say 1 in 5 gamers are switching to 360. Most are only saying that because the PSN is still down. Once it is back up, people will be happy again and want to put the whole thing behind them, just like Sony.
If anyone has any agreements or arguments to make about anything I've said above, anything I may have got wrong or misrepresented, I would love to hear your opinions.
I'm just worried my friend could be right and MS' method of buying their way into and buying out the market could hurt competition and place 360 on top, especially if MS can keep making cheap crap and sell it for huge amounts and continue lying about how it is better than anything the competition does. In the end though, exclusives are what make the console, so no worries there for Sony.
If Sony wanted to turn profit rather than move the industry forward, all they have to do is make a PS3 with faster RAM, a new graphics card, bigger hard drive and low production costs similar or cheaper than the PS3's, and hey presto!! Playstation 4!!! Nintendo and MS play catch up while Sony pushes ahead slightly and is cheaper than MS or Nintendo. But that isn't Sony's style, I know the PS4 will be the best because Sony had so much success with the PS2 and recently with the PS3, while also learning from their mistakes early on in the PS3's life. It's not Sony's fault that hackers have a grudge against them and these same hackers adore anything MS makes, regardless of quality.
One more thing.
OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD!!! I just hope the US stays safe and secure because everyone is predicting some form of retaliation. Stay safe USA, the world still cares.
Last edited by Dancemachine55 on 5/1/2011 10:40:24 PM
The math would put 35 million copies at just over two billion dollars.
I doubt your friend is right… With 2011's Ps3 exclusive line up the Ps3 is bound to boost sales. Maybe Sony lost some money over this outage, but they do sell TV's and other things like Surround Sound Systems. What about the NGP? Im sure people will buy it, the thing itself isn't even out yet & it has some great features. If Sony really is loosing money, im sure they will show it, they wouldn't give all of us PS+ for the outage & that free whatever. They would just not give us anything but they are wich in my opinion means they got money to blow. I wouldn't worry.
Last edited by Killa Tequilla on 5/1/2011 10:47:13 PM
I don't know the numbers, but I assume the 360 creates a black hole as well. They had to replace tons of busted systems and they spend more on advertising in a week than most of their games actually pull in.
I know for a fact that MS are no where near recovering their losses after the stupid amounts of money they spent marketing Kinect.
Hey, at least Sony spend money where it counts, production, not marketing.
No matter how good marketing is, if the item is crap or has a short lifespan before being taken over by another product, than that is the fault of the company for not making a good enough product.
Sony spend their money on making everything high quality, so even if it does cost a little more than the competition, as the saying goes "you get what you pay for". Even if marketing is poor compared to the competition, word of mouth spreads fast if you create something unique and incredible. Look at Heavy Rain!!!
Last edited by Dancemachine55 on 5/1/2011 11:13:52 PM
@ tes37
You have to factor in what cut of the profit Sony is getting with each GT5 game sold.
If Sony were only receiving $10 on each GT5, then they would receive $350 million if 35 million were sold. Isn't that around the same amount Sony spent funding and marketing the game? I could be wrong here though.
With sales of around 6.37 million, and realistically Sony were receiving $15 per game sold, that would mean Sony has made around $95 million from GT5 sales alone. Sony had spent approximately $80 million on the game.
Wow, never trusting my friend again whenever he spews rubbish about Sony's gaming division being a black hole for the company. Perhaps he was speaking about 3 years ago, which was more likely the case.
No doubt Sony has been knocked down from this hit, but like any good Rocky movie, Sony gets back up to finish the fight!!!
The 360 has made quarterly profits this generation but I have seen estimates that said Microsoft's overall xbox division losses are in the billions–3 to 4 billion (and counting) IIRC. THAT is a true budget-black-hole. And I've wondered for while that if anyone other than microsoft had created the xbox and had run the xbox division the way they have, we would not have seen an xbox 360. Hell, the original xbox may have failed before the generation was up.
Sounds like he just picked a bad number to try and prove his point. There were quite a few Collector's Editions tossed in the mix as well. I just multiplied 60 x 35 million, which equals 2,100,000,000.
The Collector's Editions that were sold should net them a little more than $15, but I'm only guessing with that and have no information as to an exact figure.
Dancemachine55, Basically you're saying your friend thinks everyone should create a cheap'n'nasty console with low budget games and charge us to play online. He must be a really excellent public speaker since you felt the need to share with us your worries, rather than just laugh at him.
GT5 did not cost $50 million to make, that's ridiculous. Polyphony will break even at about 4-5 million copies – oh, wait, they already sold that many. So, no worries there. It's also important to point out that Sony's gaming division is in profit, and that although PSN has not yet made a profit on it's own, it does contribute revenue. The attack on PSN will undoubtedly mean another year or two of loss making on PSN, but PSN was moving pretty quickly towards profit – not bad for a network that's free.
I think your friend's argument has more holes in it than a ripe swish cheese, and could easily point out that Microsoft's entertainment division hasn't been a great profit center for MS either. So they're hardly one to talk.
"Hopefully, Japan will have a much better second half of the year"
hate to burst your bubble, but it won't. Why? their economy is slowing down and clearly doesn't help the fact that the cost of reconstruction keep piling up, a cost that probably force the country to eventually start print more money out of thin air.
They can just put all their robots to work for awhile.
@A2K78
Why are you such a downer all the time?
Last edited by Kangasfwa on 5/2/2011 12:13:10 AM
And how, exactly, is rebuilding their infrastructure worse than suffering through a huge earthquake, hundreds or even thousands of deaths AND a nuclear power plant meltdown?
Sorry A2K78, but unless you wrote that comment for attention, it wasn't a very good one. I know people are entitled to their opinions, but show some respect!! Japan needs all the love and help they can get, and they're clearly getting none from you.
That would never stop people from hoping that the rest of the year would be better for Japan.
i figure sony would bounce back, glad to know they are on their way back to where they were at before the psn outage.
glad to know that osama is dead now have our military go in and kill gaddafi ass
I hope my stock guy was wise enough to jump on the stock when it plummeted. Even I know that will rise like crazy after this mess.
It was not cool what Shinra Electric Power Company did. I mean Tokyo…
lol bin laden confirmed dead. I havent seen this much press about a mans life ending since prince willams wedding!
badum ching!
Saddam Hussein when captured and when getting hung
Last edited by Bloodysilence19 on 5/1/2011 11:43:30 PM
ba-dum-ch
Bazinga!!!
since the topic of the terrorist is being discussed i jus want 2 add my aspect.
what osama did was acts so foul & then to embrace them made it even worst however….. i trust nobody only the Almighty i dont deal with politics or the government. in history & present we have watchd read or heard of folks who dealt with conflicts threw vengance or revenge & the results is its never resolved instead it rises to another degree. so i advise that all be prepared & aware but never fear.
It's the Almighty who run Al-Quaida too. Enjoy your religion.
dont have a religion i believe im a souljah meaning my soul belongs to the Almighty & cause im from jamaica & we use the name Jahovah the name the say thats the Almighty name i live my life accordingly to him & not what man preaches. i respect the Almighty & nature my principals is peace unity love & respect thats what i stand for.
i believe the Al Quadia praise the same Almighty but because there language is different they refer to em as Allah the one only. as far what they stand for they dont respect the almighty & niether nature & their guidlines are beliefs is of another man therefore they live a deceptive life.
Last edited by PharaohJR on 5/2/2011 12:56:27 PM
everythings up, the AUD hit 111 USC for the FIRST TIME IN HISTORY!
maybe will start to see things actually being cheaper here?
HA!
who am i kidding?
Not with your tax structure!
Q!
"play.experience.enjoy"
maybe one day we can have a universal currency and everyone pays the same for everything.
ok you have to pay shipping costs, but then why is the ps3 cheaper in the states then here?
last time i checked the ps3 is made in asia, and last time i checked its MUCH cheaper to ship something from asia to AU, then it is to ship that same thing from asia to US.
why should you have to pay more just because of where you live?
i still cant believe how cheap everything is in the states, i mean almost everything is half the price it is here!
Sony is hacked and always will be hacked.. no matter what they do. they can make a new firmware they can change all there codes, they can do what ever they want to do. but it all comes down to the point that they will hacked again and again. and maybe worse. HERE THIS OUT.. 3.55 came out ok it was running for a while till they figured out they got hacked and CFW came out so they put a update 3.56 in 1week it got hacked or i would say jailbroken. and 2weeks after they put a next update 3.60 saying controller auto shut off.. we all know thats b.s they sent that update becuase 3.56 got jailbroken and people was still hacking online games. so 3.60 came out 2weeks again what happen jailbroken.. so they shut the services… now about the the credit card stolen out of sonys safe.. sony deserved 100% what they got.. 1 hacker knowing to all "geohot" got sued for hacking the unhackable system the PS3, and sony will now be facing 1.1billion dollars in lawsuits. now sony will feel what geohot felt when he got sued but 5times harder. SONY LEAVE THE HACKERS THEY ONLY HACK GAMES AND MAKE CUSTOM FIRMWARES. THEY COULD CARELESS ABOUT THE CREDIT CARD OR ANYTHING ELSE.I WILL NOT EXPOSE.. THEY TOOK THE CREDIT CARD INFORMATION ON PURPOSE TO MAKE YOU GET SUED BECAUSE WHAT YOU DID TO GEOHOT. REVENGE IS A BI*CH.