Lingyis said:
JSF said:
I don't believe price is the issue. It's the marketing. They need to make it clear that it is not intended as just a gaming rig and that it is a full-blown entertainment center with high def video, media streaming, etc. All the PS3 commercials I've seen only show some demonstration of the games. What people want is value. This is often mistaken for price, but it's not the same. Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas are the top selling cars because of their value propositions, not because they're the lowest priced. Yes, there is a segment of people out there who are the most price-sensitive and will buy the Hyundai's and Kia's of the world. That's fine. These people will wait for price drops to buy.
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price is exactly the amount people are willing to pay for whatever value they perceive of a product. few people are willing for fork over $600 for games and just unproven media capabilities. in order words, their perceived value of the PS3 is not anything close to $600. price is at least 80% of why PS3 is having a poor start well, sometimes i read these articles i can't believe people are going over such minute technical details. wii is takes away sales, there's little PS3 can do about that. with consoles there's an aggregation effect, and it's especially apparent in Japan. in the US the PS3 has trouble gaining momentum against the 360. sony does appear to have a better long term plan for the PS3 than Microsoft for the 360, but it's had such a bad start a lot of things need to go right. |
The PS3 is obviously a good value. The manufacturer is losing a few hundred bucks on each one, for pete's sake. How often are you going to get to buy anything at significantly below
the manufacturing costs? If the "perceived" value does not reflect that, then, as I said, it is the
fault of the marketing. The marketing thus far has plain sucked. PS3 commercials don't inform your average consumer that it is a very good Blu-Ray movie player, and it's fully integrated, which is a bonus. They don't mention the DVD upscaling capabilities. They don't mention the ability to display and print photos from memory cards. They don't mention its ability to stream multimedia content from your PC or any DLNA serving device. They don't mention the free online service. Or what they can do with the free online service. Or the built-in wireless. Or the web browsing capability. In short, Sony's marketing has done a terrible job educating the average consumer about the PS3's full capabilities. Say whatever you want about whether you want some of these functions or not, but the fact is they *are* included and should be properly marketed and that to get the same functionality from any other system or PC would cost more than a PS3. Obviously a price cut would help as well, but fixing the marketing message should come first. Sh#t, if the marketing in the States isn't already bad, the marketing situation in Europe is even worse. What the hell is that "This is Living" campaign? It tells people absolutely nothing about the system.
By the way, about the original topic of this thread, if you actually want to see a big time PS3 critic who has done a 180 instead of whoever that guy is quoted in the opening post, see Adam Sessler after the Sony Gamers' Day.
http://www.g4tv.com/pile_player.aspx?video_key=16349
