A thread on the gaming hardware/industry board (nicknamed “Geha”) pointed out differences in how Sony and Nintendo handle accounting in their earnings reports. The starting point was the observation that Nintendo excludes download-only titles from its sales tallies, while Sony effectively treats the PlayStation Store as a “retailer,” letting it book digital sales revenue as its own. Posters argued back and forth over whether this discrepancy makes Sony’s operating margin look better than it really is, with others countering that Nintendo’s operating profit in absolute terms still exceeds Sony’s regardless. The discussion also expanded into the apparent contradiction of studio closures and layoffs continuing even as earnings are reported as strong.
But the operating profit figure itself doesn't change, so Nintendo is still coming out behind either way.
Also, this would mean Nintendo's operating margin ends up looking even lower.
That's exactly the point — don't compare numbers that can't be compared.
>But the operating profit figure itself doesn't change, so Nintendo is still coming out behind either way.
Sure, fine, but you'll at least admit that since the Switch launched, Sony has only beaten Nintendo on operating profit for the last year and a half — and was behind for most of that time?
if everything goes digital-only, the earnings numbers just keep looking better and better.
Of course, that only makes the numbers look better;
they'll still do layoffs and cut Kojima loose regardless.
They're doing great BECAUSE they're throwing everything away, buddy.
And here's some good news!
There's still plenty more left to throw away, buddy.
Gotta cut the least essential stuff first while things are still going well.
SCE kept saying business was "great" right up until the PS3 era dragged them into negative net worth, lol.
Unlike us anonymous nobodies rambling on 5ch and Twitter, this guy's a paid "expert" (lol) who writes articles under his real name.
Can he really just get away with a "whoops, my bad, sorry"? Well, he hasn't even admitted he was wrong in the first place anyway.
Suspicious Japanese!
That is some seriously suspicious Japanese! (a meme jab implying the poster's phrasing looks like a non-native speaker's or a bot's)
Ask the guy claiming "PS has an 80% digital ratio!" whether that means Wilds sold 4 million copies in Japan, and he snaps back that no, that's not what it means.
Can't help but laugh — classic case of getting mad when he's the one who's wrong.
Apparently it's because they treat the PlayStation Store as if it were a retailer.
In other words, since SIE sets the price, they count the whole sale amount as revenue.
My take is that it's less "Nintendo's too honest" and more "Sony's just way too shady."
Accounting is supposed to be reported honestly as a rule, you know.
Even so, how do you explain the studio closures, cutting director Kojima loose, and then having the resulting flagship title turn out with quality like Wolverine's?
Come on, fanboys, care to answer?
Because Konami — after cutting loose their own "King Bombee" (a cursed, bad-luck mascot character from a board game series, used here to mean Kojima was bad luck for them) — is doing amazingly well.
The conclusion the Sony fanboys drew from Sony's own numbers was that Concord was the future of PlayStation… that's just too bleak for words.
Isn't it good BECAUSE they did that? Cutting the money pits makes you more profitable, right?
They're literally buying up studios and then closing them though…
Sony's basically a corporate "fixer" — they buy up anyone who might become a future rival and kill them off.
They bought them thinking they'd be profitable,
then ditched them once they weren't.
That's not a contradiction at all.
So no matter how well Suika Game sells, it never shows up in the earnings numbers ← got it
They're releasing a physical version of Suika Game ← wait, so what happens now?!
Well, the physical copies would count at least.
Unclear.
It'll probably be either counting sales only from the physical release onward, or retroactively counting the whole period.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Nintendo’s and Sony’s financial disclosures count game software sales differently. Nintendo publishes combined package-plus-download sales figures only for titles that also had a physical release, while titles that stayed digital-only throughout — like “Suika Game,” mentioned in the thread — have never been reflected in the officially published cumulative sales totals. Sony, meanwhile, uses an accounting treatment that handles the PlayStation Store as an effective sales channel rather than its own product, meaning digital sales of third-party titles can also be booked as Sony’s own revenue. The thread’s central debate was over how this structural difference makes comparing operating margins difficult, and how the term “digital ratio” gets thrown around without ever being clearly defined. Opinions were also split on how to interpret the continued studio closures and layoffs alongside reportedly strong earnings, pointing to an industry reality that can’t be summed up by a simple good-or-bad performance narrative.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Sad News] Differences Between Sony and Nintendo’s Accounting Standards Start to Come to Light lolololololol.”
