Sony and making money
This is an interesting article on how long term a company has to think in order to make money:
http://www.playstationuniversity.com/ps3-hardware-now-profitable-for-sony-3816/
May 16th, 2010 at 11:30 am –
Sony now no longer loses money on each PlayStation 3 console sold. Quite the achievement for a piece of hardware that originally cost the company in the region of $800 USD to produce, if not more.
No-one expected Sony to cut the price of the PS3 in 2009 when it was still a loss making proposition, but with the release of the improved PS3 Slim, the company gained some breathing space. However, with a new price point of $299, not even the Slim could turn a profit, losing approximately $18 per console as recently as this year. That is until we brought you the console’s latest revision.
So they sold PS3 at a loss for years, and that’s not even counting the years and immense investments they put into creating the console in the first place.
In short, they invest a lot of money and work really hard to create something we will like and buy. Thank you. Let’s now hope they (finally) make a lot of money on the PS3, so they have resources to put into creating new valuable products, like Playstation 4…
The story continues, part 2
Last week my PS3 adventure has involved two things:
- Playing Fallout 3, finally.
- Playing GTA 4 online, multiplayer.
Lots of fun and some frustration. Tried writing a post on Fallout 3, but my brain won’t cooperate. It’s drafted and will be finished and posted in the coming days.
PS3, the story continues
It’s been a week now, and I’m as enthralled as ever, and I haven’t even played Fallout 3 and Little Big Planet yet. It’s been GTA 4 all the way. What an insanely great game it is. When I’m not playing I’m thinking about the game and study the map of Liberty City, the fictional city in which the game takes place. In fact I think playing this game is improving my map reading skill and my spatial intelligence.
Feel I’m becoming a serious gamer, though I’m sure it’ll be less intense in a while. Aside from playing (and studying the map) I’ve been hunting information on the internet, reading articles and watching videos on youtube. I want to get a “feel” for what’s out there, which games are considered the best on PS3, and so on, so I’ve read lots of “top ten PS3”-games articles. The games I’m right now most interested in getting are Bioshock and Infamous, especially since both are kind of old and therefore not expensive.
I’ve also read comparisons between PS3 and XBox 360. I hadn’t played on either when I made my purchase, but I’m more confident than ever that I made the right decision. Guess I’m a PS3 fanboy now.
PS3, first impressions
Got my playstation a few days ago, and so far I’ve played two of my four games. Verdict: very happy. Great console, silent and works flawlessly so far.
First day: played Wipeout. Looks great (it’s in 1080p HD, but I’m using an old CRT-TV, looks great anyway), fun to play. What can I say, classic PS game. Can get a little repetitive if played too much, unlike…
Second Day: Played some more Wipeout, but also installed GTA4. Love this game, it’s the main reason I bought the PS3. Looks, sounds and feels fabulous.
Playstation 3 and some games
Ordered a Playstation 3 (my first game console) + some games a couple of days ago. That’ll be fun, I hope, and a good activity when I’m too tired to do something else, but too non-tired to engage in ordinary resting. Plus I think computer games are beneficial for the mind.
These are the games:
- GTA 4 (platinum)
- Wipeout HD Fury
- Fallout 3
- Little Big Planet
Why these? All four was on discount (games at full price are pretty expensive), and the first three I’ve played (and enjoyed) earlier versions of, and the fourth seemed kind of fun plus it can be played multiplayer locally, which I wanted.
Freeciv Longturn
I’ve been playing some Freeciv Longturn lately. Freeciv is a free version of Sid Meier’s famous game Civilization (which I’m not going to explain), and Freeciv Longturn is a version of Freeciv where each turn lasts 12-24 hours (as against minutes in ordinary Freeciv), so a game can easily take months and you can put as much or as little effort into it as you like.
It’s great fun, and there are also a lot of real-life concepts and skills clarified and practiced in the game. Certain real-life skills would make you a better player, and, conversely, learning to play the game well could improve certain areas in your real life.
Here are some of them (some overlapping or otherwise related):
- Goals and plans. Kind of obvious and a part of many games, but I mention it as a background to some of the points below.
- Expansion and consolidation. You need balance between the two. If you expand without consolidation your empire will be stretched thin and weak; it’s growing too fast (you will not have proper defence, enough roads, and so on). But if you overemphasize consolidation over expansion you may get full control over what you have, but you miss out on growth and will be left behind. This has a lot of parallells to real life.
- Flexibility. You set goals and make plans, but the world is changing all the time, and sometimes in a way that makes the old goal and/or plan obsolete. You have to update or suffer the consequences. (But the principles remain the same throughout, just like in life.)
- Decision making. It’s easy to get lost among all options; a good general decision-making skill, perhaps even an explicit method, helps.
- Risk/benefit assessment. Important part of the decision making process.
- Dealing with the unknown (and unexpected). Also important in the decision making process. Like life, but unlike chess, you don’t have full information about the world and its entities, but you still have to take into account what you don’t know. You need to make inferences and guesses about the unknown from the known.
- Stress, frustration and hopelessness management. If you take the game seriously and invest a lot of time and energy, you will have strong emotional reactions to what’s going on (like when someone launches an unexpected big attack, threatening to ruin the things you’ve been working on for weeks), and these need to be managed.
- Cooperation and conflict. Plenty of both, like always when you interact with humans.
- Combining micro- and macro management. Both attention to detail and the whole picture are needed.
- Resource management. Allocation of limited resources with alternative uses. That’s also central to the human existence in general, on many levels.