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makingmusic476 on 20 April 2009
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starcraft said:
makingmusic476 said:
1. A $50 price cut from $399 means little in the grand scheme of things. They'll probably cut it $100, or not at all.

2. Hardware costs are still going down. The 45nm Cell and RSX will help a lot. We should start seeing 45nm Cells in ps3s by mid-Summer, last we heard. Smaller chipsets leads to smaller heatsinks, less required ventilation, etc.

3. The isupply figure you used is from back in December. Things can change drastically in a year.

4. Retailers don't pay Sony substantially less for consoles than consumers do. They pay $4-5 less. GameStop actually loses 20 cents per console sold after they factor in their own shipping costs. Retailers aren't in this to make money from hardware. They make some money from new software (not much more than $6 per game in the US), but the lions share of their profit comes from new accessories (Sony manufactures a DS3 for ~$6 and sells it to retailers for under $20, who then resell it for $55) and used goods.

I personally think we'll see a $100 price cut no later than the holidays, barring the economy going even more haywire and the yen spiking even further.

The Yen is another issue I didn't mention.  I agree that a lot can happen in a year.  But even if the PS3 was only losing $50 earlier this year, a $100 price cut would make that $150, which at best would probably STILL be a $50 loss by the time cost reductions are taken into account.

Bear in mind the ever diminishing revenue from the PS2, which is what created the profit back in the final quarter of Calendar Year 2007.

 

 

Hey, they managed to make a profit in the final quarter of Calendar Year 2008, too.  A measley $4 million USD profit, but a profit nontheless. 

And in your "best case scenario", Sony would only be losing $50 per ps3 sold, which means they would've been MAKING $100 per console sold just prior to the price cut, so they would've been doing quite well the previous quarter, possibly well enough to justify a cut that would significantly boost their sales over the holiday quarter.  :P

The real craziness we have to think about is the rumored PSP2/PSP-4000.  Would they really launch a PSP that has had a major hardware overhaul before dropping the price of the ps3?

Btw, check the stealth edit from my previous post.  :P