Sony's PS3 losses exceed $3 billion

We're all well aware that Sony was losing money big-time to the PS3. It was a lose-lose situation for them, with the Wii and Xbox 360 proving to be much more popular while being cheaper to produce. Thus even a sale went on the books as a monetary loss, something that hurt their games division around the time of the PS3 launch.

Well after launch and now into a more stable market where Sony has millions of deployed PS3s, how much did it set them back? According to recent reports, selling the console at a loss ended up costing them over $3 billion, including a little over $2 billion in 2007 and over $1 billion this year so far.

The company was expecting this, it seems, and even informed their investors that they would face a substantial loss, and will take some time even now to turn a profit for them. Even with these tremendous losses, they are still not all that much different from Microsoft who shoveled a lot of money into the Xbox 360, including a $1 billion warranty extension due to hardware failures.