Near the holidays... this'd have the best impact and won't give the others enough time to respond...

Im still hoping for the "Playstation 3 Slimmer"

If the wii2 is real and announced E3 il bet my left nut both sony and MS will cut price they'll do anything to steal attention from nintendo

More like near the holidays, cutting price in mid year is a waste oportunity.

I think summer 2012. Due to Sony's low profit margins on the Playstation 3 at the moment they will cut price when they 'need' to, not when they want a bit of red to brighten up the balance books.

To put it in perspective, in order the drop the price on 10 million PS3s by $50 they have to sacrifice half a billion dollars. This is something they will probably do in order to justify the brands continued existence for the sake of profiting in the future, but they aren't going to burn billions when their profits are so slim and it's not necessary to do.

Edit: Also they are selling the NGP for a loss this holiday/early next year. I don't even want to think about how much they will be bleeding this holiday if they had a price cut on the PS3.

i sense much fear above....

September is perfect period for price drop.

And they don't have to enter emergency mode like Nintendo ;)

It wont be at E3 more towards the end of the year october.

I'm just being realistic (or what I perceive as realistic) :P

For the record I don't think Microsoft is eager to drop the price on their system any time soon either. I think they will both aim for more value bundles or Move/Kinect boxed bundle deals before resorting to a direct price cut on base units.

yeah i bet there will be a 2nd slim. most likely they'll announce it at E3 I think.