The Cost of Gaming, PS3
posted on 2009-03-31 11:13:00

Just so you know, everyone wants to believe different things.

However, people making outrageous claims that Sony's loosing money when they sell PS3s is foolish. A stock representitive saw that the Sony's stocks are going down and simply made a semi-true chart to boost gamer's morale about Sony sucking all of their paychecks out of their pockets. This semi-true chart claims that it costs 800 or 900 dollars to produce a PS3. THIS would be true, if the readers didn't precieve it the completely wrong way. It says Sony spends 350 dollars on the blu-ray drive alone, they spend nothing like that, they manufacture them theirselves. Other high priced objects, such as the GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU (central processing unit), the prices for them are drastically lowered depending on how many they order at once, it's called wholesale. Wholesale is when a company that creats something sells it to someone for less because they buy a lot at once. Say Intel makes a new CPU, and Dell decides they want it in their latest desktop computer, they go to Intel and order 2,000 of these processors. While these processors would cost 300 dollars or more just to buy from a store, Intel knows Dell wouldn't shell out 300 dollars per computer they wish to create, because there are far more parts and components that must be purchaced. Then Intel takes in consideration, that selling these for a lower ammount of money to Dell would give them a higher advantage in marketing their new processor. A nice starting point. (And for any PC fanatics out there, I know, Intel wouldn't  need Dell to help spread the word, it's just an example.) Then they work out the deal, and Dell orders 2,000 processors from Intel for maybe around 100 dollars each. That puts 200 grand in Intel's processor, and allows Dell to profit too. Everyone's happy. This being said, you can knock out the blu-ray in that list, and then take off about 50 or 75% of the other prices, and that would be how much it costs for Sony to shell out a batch of PS3s. Now, if YOU were to order each part yourself, and build the system yourself, yes, you would be spending near 1,000 dollars.