Sony not planning on “major loss” with the PlayStation 4

In an earnings conference call, Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato (pictured) explained that the PlayStation 4 console will be more profitable at launch than the PlayStation 3. This will lead the next fiscal year's operating income in the PlayStation unit to remain in line with previous years, despite the console transition. The PlayStation 3 was comprised of the proprietary Cell processor and the Blu-Ray drive, which drove up production costs on the system.

"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. 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."

Sony did not provide a sales forecast for the system, which is now based on the x86 AMD Jaguar CPU instead of IBM's PowerPC line, like the Cell. PlayStation 2 sales were removed from the fiscal year 2013 forecast, with Sony expecting to sell 10 million PlayStation 3 consoles.