DOWN PERISCOPE: Sony to drop PS3 to 299$

[Bodhesatva]

Okay, so I've done a bit more research into this just to try to get some idea, even though I'd said I'd wait. Still not saying it's absolutely impossible, but this is what I've found:

1) The "299.99 PS3" receipt is a fake. Or rather, it's a employee deal, and not applicable to regular customers. 

2) Many of these "rumors" from the Slicknet boards are much older than one would guess. For example, this one, linked to in the linked article (again, this entire story is links within links within links to forum posts, not actual sources):

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showpost.php?p=9578520&postcount=162

Says that we'd see a price drop announcement next week -- which was the week of January 11th.

Several are by the same person, such as this one:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showpost.php?p=9578520&postcount=162

And this one:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showpost.php?p=9641634&postcount=25

 

As you can see, the guy who originally called for an announced price drop at CES last week is the same guy later on.

All of these "rumors" come from a single thread, this one:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?p=9641634#post9641634

Which is actually about using a 100 dollar gift card to make the PS3 299, and it somehow spun out of control from there.

3) Sony has never announced that they've cut the price of PS3 production in half, as the story claims.

4) The rumors about Paramount defection have now been proven categorically false by Paramount themselves, but the article linked suggests otherwise.

5) It has not "traditionally been 20k for all three companies" to lisence games, as this article claims, either. The PS3 dev kit was 20k and is now 10k, but the Wii's has been less than 5k for some time now, for example.

 

 

So many innaccuracies with absolutely no reliable sources. Since it's only a week away I'll wait and see, but the sheer number of errors already shown is a bad sign for the validity of this rumor.