dpmnymkrprez said: wareagle372 said: the only way they will cut the price on the ps3 is if they find a cheaper way to make bluray players. If they do that, I have no doubt in my mind that the ps3's price will go down. The dvd in the ps2 were not the best on the market, so why dont they release an alternate ps3, without blue ray, and make blue ray an option???

They can't, they've committed to making ALL PS3 games on Blu-ray, even those that don't need it (correct me if I'm wrong). They'd have to do a major reshuffle of manufacturing, too, which would be costly.

dpmnymkrprez said: wareagle372 said: the only way they will cut the price on the ps3 is if they find a cheaper way to make bluray players. If they do that, I have no doubt in my mind that the ps3's price will go down. The dvd in the ps2 were not the best on the market, so why dont they release an alternate ps3, without blue ray, and make blue ray an option???

Because the games already out, such as Motorstorm and Resistance are on BD-ROM. I believe both run upwards of ~22Gb worth of data.

Sony and the PS3 are married to the format, and there really isn't any turning back now.

Sony's production and development costs are sunk. They're not getting that back, and it certainly isn't cheap to warehouse the ~1.9M unsold PS3s that have already been built. One way or another, Sony is losing money, so at some point, Sony will have to slash the price in an effort to stimulate sales and hope to make up the loss on a new run containing cheaper BL assemblies coupled with having dumped the legacy chips in favor of brute force emulation.

Problem is, $100 USD won't do it. There is a psychological barrier preventing people from buying the PS3, and coming down to $499 will not overcome that -- if it could they would never have discontinued the 20Gb model. Heck, $200 may not even be enough to do it, given that prior console launches/successes suggest that the target price range for achieving critical mass is around $249-$299 (the original NES bundle, Wii, PS1, PS2, etc ...).

dpmnymkrprez said: wareagle372 said: the only way they will cut the price on the ps3 is if they find a cheaper way to make bluray players. If they do that, I have no doubt in my mind that the ps3's price will go down. The dvd in the ps2 were not the best on the market, so why dont they release an alternate ps3, without blue ray, and make blue ray an option???

That would also make them and some of their 3rd party partners look very stupid since they claimed that next gen games would need this extra space. It's too late for them to go back now.

I'd still say the price cut isn't coming until the holidays next year and even then I'd expect Microsoft and Nintendo to be able to match it. I mean just a comparison to Microsoft they produced the Xbox360 at launch for about a 125 dollar loss and after about a year were able to take off about $200 dollars however had few exotic parts to worry about such as a blu-ray player and a Cell processor. Throw in the fact that Microsoft will likely get out 65nm machines around the same time as the PS3 and you can add in at least another 25 dollars saved per unit (guesstimate) and you basically have Microsoft being able to drop the price of the Xbox 360 at $100 dollars to coincide with any PS3 drop and well Nintendo I'd say by the time the PS3 gets to the point where they will be able to cut their cost likely will be able to drop their price down by at least $75. Anyways though all this has been discussed before like the orginal poster said to me anyways just seem like the PS3 will be in 2nd or 3rd this generation and part of that is lower sales even if your system is a value at $600 with actual cost of $840.

dpmnymkrprez said: wareagle372 said: the only way they will cut the price on the ps3 is if they find a cheaper way to make bluray players. If they do that, I have no doubt in my mind that the ps3's price will go down. The dvd in the ps2 were not the best on the market, so why dont they release an alternate ps3, without blue ray, and make blue ray an option???

Probably the same reason they didn't make a CD-version of the PS2 (Dreamcast, which it was 
competing with at the time, was CD-based) and make DVD an option.  Knowing what we know 
today, that would have been bad. 

 

Sincerely, I think that a 100$ price cut can be expected (when ?), Sony should take this risk since they don't sell enought console.

And I dont think that all is over.
There is still strong potential exclusivity on the PS3

If they cut the price AND if the game come then all is possible

Another point about Wii,
Since this console is cheap (I mean compared t Xbox360 and PS3), and possess some quite new type of game, It is possible than people will first buy Wii and then switch to PS3/Xbox360

in this case, The question will be Which combo will win ?
Xbox360/Wii or PS3/Wii ...

Because the games already out, such as Motorstorm and Resistance are on BD-ROM. I believe both run upwards of ~22Gb worth of data.

Most developers just use the space but they don't actually need to. For example resistance was indeed 22GB but since it took too long to write the game to a Blue-Ray disk they just wrote a small NSTC to Pal converter for the videos so the game would be 16GB and it would take a fourth off the writing time.

For example GameCube only had 1.5GB storage, and they had big games too like Resident-Evil. Or the lord of the rings game then used DivX compression.

So i don't think that dvd's actually limit the game, in fact dvd drive is in average just a bit faster but is much faster towards the outer side of the disk. So developers can play with the data and punt regulary used data, like the enige and main character data on the outside.

But it is easy to see that if you make a game, how small it may be and you definitly want hours and hours of 1080p video material in multiple formats on the disk you wouldhave to wait for the next-gen disk format that could hold so much data. Because game data is actually cheap, video material isn't.

 And most games come both to XBox and PS3, and since no-one actually can see the difference it probably doesn't matter.

I really do not believe a price cut is coming. The general reason why is "money," but I can break this down in to a couple reasons:

1) Financial report. Cutting the PS3 price definitely hurts the whole company's bottom line now; keeping the price as is keeps the stated goals for the fiscal year in sight. Some people here do not realize how big a deal it would be if Sony came up 1 Billion+ dollars short on their projections for the fiscal year, which is about what a 100 dollar price cut on the PS3 would do.

2) Howard Stringer. The new Sony CEO has done nothing but jettison and massively restructure the Sony divisions which aren't working very well. Now, SCI has done well in the past, but this isn't a guy who's wringing his hands, standing around and hoping things turn out better later on. Your division is either making money now, or heads roll (as Kuturagi's already has).

I have a few other points, but these are the main two. It's clear to me that Stringer isn't playing around. I think he inherently dislikes the video games division -- he's been slashing unprofitable portions of Sony left and right. Given the cyclical nature of video games, where SCI will lose gobs of money every six or seven years (even if they make it back up later, which may not happen this time around), I think Stringer is looking to have stable, reliable businesses that provide a consistent profit.

It's hard to overemphasize how big a deal a price cut would be for the whole company. Basically, you're asking the entire company to take a massive hit in the name of the PS3's market share. That just doesn't seem like Stringer's game plan.

I think I found the original news where Ryoji Chubachi did the declarations. It's in Japanese, can someone call a translator here? :)

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/net/news/20070606nt0b.htm

Google translate gives:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yomiuri.co.jp%2Fnet%2Fnews%2F20070606nt0b.htm&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

It says something about 2008, as you can see. 

HappySqurriel said: $1 (US) is roughly 120 yen Over the next 12 months Sony Gaming's biggest money maker (the PS2) will continue to see declining sales while neither the PSP nor PS3 increase in sales enough to compensate; the result of this will be that similar operating expenses will result in greater operating losses for the division. Now, it is possible that the PS3 will see a price reduction but I wouldn't expect much more than $50 or $100 ... A $100 price reduction could (potentially) put Sony as a whole into the red, and a $200 price reduction certainly would produce large losses which would upset investors.

 Absolutely agree here.  I don't think most people here are looking at the big picture. I think they're acting as if Sony is a video games company with a few other side projects; they're not. Video games are just one portion of their company -- an important one to be sure, but just one amongst cameras, TVs, Cel Phones, and Movie Studios. Basically what you're asking is for Sony's TV, Camera, Cel Phone and Movie businesses to take a huge hit in the name of the PS3. Is it possible they'll think that's worth the investment? Possibly. I wouldn't bet on it, though.