PlayStation 3 Production Costs Halved, Says Analyst

From $800 down to a bargain $400, the PlayStation 3 has its production costs in hand, claims wholesale investment bank Nikko Citigroup's Kota Ezawa. While the rest of the Business Week article retains the skepticism prevalent in just about any dissection of PS3 economics, it's the following that may be of interest to anyone who views the system's shortcomings in shades of sticker shock.

Nikko Citigroup's Kota Ezawa estimates the games division will lose $1.4 billion this fiscal year, following last year's $2.1 billion loss. And while he doesn't expect the business to be prosperous until late 2009, Ezawa applauds Sony's efforts to shrink the PS3's chips and tweak its design. Already such changes have cut the cost per machine to around $400 now, from above $800 just before it went on sale in November, 2006, he says. (The PS3 with an 80-gigabyte hard-disk drive retails in the U.S. for about $499.) "We think the biggest factor here is that simplification has become possible through a reduction in the parts count, leading to a reduction in costs," Ezawa wrote in a Dec. 27 report.

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Halo 3 Named TIME's Best Game of 2007

Magazine calls Bungie's latest gaming effort the "perfect" shooter and "graphically gorgeous."

"In one of the greatest years video gaming has ever seen, Halo 3 is the very best of the bunch," writes Lev Grossman, author of TIME's Top 10 Video Games of 2007. Grossman called Bungie's latest effort the "perfect" shooter and "graphically gorgeous."

Master Chief was so good, in fact, that he outranked The Orange Box, Rock Band, and Super Mario Galaxy -- all of which hold a greater average review score on Metacritic.

Other considerations on TIME's list include BioShock, Call of Duty 4, Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Mass Effect, Ace Combat 6, and God of War 2.

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