PS4 News: Sony Exec Promises More Profitable Hardware Than PS3 Upon Release, Hopes to Reverse Trend of Bleeding Money

In a statement by Sony's chief financial officer, Masaru Kato, the exec revealed that the company does not expect "major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4," reversing the trend in which the PlayStation 3 lost significant amounts of money on each console sold, according to Gamespot.The PlayStation 3 reportedly lost so much money because Sony had to develop and manufacture the PlayStation 3's hardware themselves, which ended up being very expensive. And because Sony sold the PlayStation 3 for less than the cost to make the hardware, the company bled millions and millions of dollars. As Kato explained:

"We made a lot of in-house investments to develop the [PlayStation 3 Cell processor] ...development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities invested by us ourselves."

The PlayStation 4, on the other hand, will use existing technology in the console's hardware, leading to less money being spent to manufacture each system, leading to less of a financial loss selling the next-gen console.

"...we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate, and also product investment and all facilities will now be invested by our partners...We don't have to make all the investment in-house."

Sony has partnered with chip manufacturer AMD to develop the PlayStation 4's APU, and the device will also contain a custom-made Radeon GPU and 8 core 64 bit processor. The console will also have 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. All this means that, by using high-end computer parts in the PlayStation 4, developers will have an easier time making games for the system, and will be able to bring out the full potential of the hardware much easier than with the PlayStation 3.