Why are so many people requesting console price cuts?

[NJ5]

akuma587 said:
Adjusted for inflation consoles should start out at pretty much in the $300-400 range and they would still have price parity with the older generations of consoles. People are just kind of picky and are used to paying less for consoles.

There's a reason for that, which is that electronic items keep getting cheaper with time. To give an example, the first PC I had (around the years of 1989 or 1990) cost the equivalent of 1500 € (not adjusted for inflation, if I adjusted it would be even higher), and it wasn't a state of the art PC at that time (386 @ 25 MHz with 4 MB of RAM). For that price, nowadays you could get a super-fancy PC with all sorts of bells and whistles and high-end hardware.

This means that there are two factors affecting console prices - cost savings in electronic components, and inflation. That's why many people expect console prices to stay flat or decrease in each generation. The problem is that Microsoft and Sony (especially Sony) crammed a lot of lateral stuff into their consoles (especially Blu-Ray). That's the only reason why prices went higher, and one of the reasons for the relative failure of HD consoles.