Borkachev on 24 January 2008
It would piss me off to a ridiculous degree if they dropped BC from all available models. I'm hoping that's not what's going on, though. Here's a comment from PS3fanboy's thread on this:
Ben Lizzotte said...
I work at Best Buy and I was talking to our Sony rep and I'm pretty sure this just has to do with the motorstorm bundle. We've been out of the 80gb for awhile now and she said that Sony is waiting for the current 80gb to sell out across the country and then they'll be sending out regular 80gb without the game bundled in.
I work at Best Buy and I was talking to our Sony rep and I'm pretty sure this just has to do with the motorstorm bundle. We've been out of the 80gb for awhile now and she said that Sony is waiting for the current 80gb to sell out across the country and then they'll be sending out regular 80gb without the game bundled in.
That does make sense. The other thing to consider is that they need to get ready for the new SKU with the DS3 bundled.
Since I doubt they'd give us a worse deal on the system at this point in its life, my guess is that the new SKU would have no game included, but would give you the option to pick one of your choice off the shelf. That's how it works in Europe, doesn't it? To introduce a new SKU like this, they have to discontinue the old one at some point.
If they're still making 80gb units, they'll probably be using the new 65nm process like the 40gb. So there's another reason to introduce a new SKU and discontinue the old one. While they're at it, they might upgrade the harddrive, or they might not. It's not a really big deal either way.
My guess is that it would remain at the current price, but in the unlikely event that these $299 rumors are true, I guess they'd probably sell it for $399 or $450 (in the latter case, they'd probably boost the HD to 120gb or, better yet, bundle in 2 games instead of one).
The problem is, there's no way to know if this is what's happening or not. With the backward-ass decision making they've been doing, it's just as likely they're canceling BC altogether. We can't count on Sony to tell us, or at least to tell us the truth. We're flying blind here, and I don't like it.
