Sony Sees Game Division Rise 135%

As usual, it takes a while for the PlayStation brand to turn a profit for Sony. But eventually, it does indeed happen.

While the third-quarter results for the electronic giant showed a slight decrease in overall profits (down 8.6% to $893 million), Sony attributed that downturn to the slowing sales of LCD TVs, and the fact that their movie division lost money. But these days, Sony Computer Entertainment is no longer posting massive losses; in fact, quite the opposite: revenue for Sony's Networked Products & Services Division fell 6.4% to $7.4 billion but operating profit was up 135% to $564 million. And why?

"The game business benefited from significant cost reductions of PlayStation 3 hardware and higher unit sales of PS3 software, which favorably impacted the change in segment operating results."

Sony sold 6.3 million PS3 units during the quarter, down just a bit from the 6.5 million it sold in the same quarter in 2009. On the other hand, software sales rose significantly, from 47.6 million to 57.6 million; for the PSP, hardware was down from 4.2 million to 3.6 million, but software climbed from 15.0 million to 16.5 million. Obviously, a year later, there's just more hardware around, which means more game sales.

And as time goes on, things should continue to improve for SCE.