they sold their TV products to TCL, which was the bread and butter to them for decades.
The company shareholders are enjoying its slow death, with the usual cash grab on high sale value and peak profits for them then “fuck the sony workers” approach.
Another reason to hate Sony.
Sony has been a pretty big player and investor in VR and 3D headsets and displays for decades, so they have a lot of patents compared to relative newcomers like Meta. This will surely shrink the innovation pool.
To sell now means they just don’t see VR tech as being profitable over any meaningful timeframe, but I know it comes as part of a wider ‘exit from hardware’ Sony is doing… maybe VR will prove profitable medium term for others, but I see Meta has burned $19bil last year on VR and isn’t expecting profit any year soon, at about a 20:1 burn rate… So who knows.
Pretty sure big tech has lost the plot and Sony is activating parachute mode while there’s still cash on offer.
With a lot of the decisions Sony has been making recently, I think they just want to roll over and die. Loudly proclaiming anti-consumer practices and other things to piss off literally everyone isn’t the kind of business strategy I would go with.
Japanese megacorps and anti-consumer practices are certainly nothing new though.
All that’s really changed lately for Sony is a sell-off of some of their hardware arms. Why? Anyone’s guess. But with such a heavily-diversified portfolio of businesses and rising profit share each year in the billions, I don’t think I’d be betting on them dying anytime soon.
Feels like Sony has gone full “bean counter” mode in the last year or so. Maybe because of the AI bubble and the general state of the economy, but could also be due to changes in leadership.
It’s a smart move by sony. Apple, google, and meta all spent zillions of dollars on vr/ar development, and yet all of them didn’t get significant consumer uptake, and all of them don’t see profit even on a remotely envisionable horizon. So it seems very smart to get out of that market, especially now while you can still get back a lot of money from selling your patents
Why is Valve selling VR headsets then?
Same reason they make any hardware - because ‘computer gamer’ is a self-selective higher income demographic, so Valve can charge higher than their component cost and if it succeeds, great, hopefully that’ll translate into more Steam store game sales that they take 30% of (the real profit). If not - no big loss, since very little was invested/risked under that model.
Valve don’t make any of their budgets or financials public, which makes analysing “is this a profitable market sector” near impossible with respect to them.
