The most important source of cash is the profit a business makes from trading, and most loss-making businesses eventually run out of cash (Tutor2u, n.d.). Keeping this fact in mind, SIE sells its consoles at a loss—the degree to which is unknown because the company keeps the cost of the materials comprising its consoles a secret. Given that Sony’s PlayStation 5 disc version console is $599, if an example of a $90 loss is used per console sold, selling the 500,000 consoles as per the initial new customer goal will net a loss of $4.5 million. Selling 17.1 million to match the target customer population would net a loss of about $1.54 billion.

This cash flow problem is handled by the sale of video game software. It costs about $2.00 to press a Blu-ray disc (Bangeman, 2006), which is the medium PlayStation games use. The majority of PlayStation 5 games are sold for $70 (new). Most owners of a console buy more than one game, with the average PlayStation owner owning around ten games (Tailby, 2019). Ten games less cost of Blu-ray printing is $680, which makes up for the $90 loss per console sold almost 8 times over. This translates to an average of $590 profit per console owned by a customer. This strategy is key to staying ahead of any cash flow problems caused by manufacturing and sales of the console.