superchunk said:
OT: Sony realized that they misjudged their target audience and what the majority of them are willing to pay. Obviously 10 million weren't waiting outside stores to pay $500+ for a PS3 as they originally thought. So, they re-evaluated the situation and realized that the $400 price range was a much better starting point. While MS was able to make overall smaller and cuts over time since they were already under the $300 range with their intitial sku.
Even though the PS3 had a bluray player, its perceived value for what its primary purpose is was not worth $500 to most consumers, thankfully for Sony they realized that early and made the right choice.
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I don't think it was so much that Sony misjudged their audience so much as they misjudged the amount of pressure they would get from third parties to drop the price. Six hundred bucks is perceived as way too expensive for a movie player by most people, even if it's a high definition movie player. Particularly when BDs are so much more expensive than DVDs and DVDs still look fantastic on many HD TVs.
Sony didn't have a choice -- they were already losing *way* too much money on the PS3 even at $599. They couldn't release it cheaper and still hope to make a profit this generation. It wasn't Sony's plan to make the PS3 this expensive, it was Kutagari overestimating Sony's ability to manufacture. He did with the PSP and he did even more with the PS3. Kutagari failed, and in failing he set the blame at Sony's feet instead of his own. Sony management wasn't getting sufficient feedback from him.
Even as such, they castrated their original vision of a machine. Most notably, they cut the Cell from 2 cores to 1 core, which makes it less suitable toward general purpose CPU calculations and more difficult to program for. Sony had to choose between several undesirable things: (1) make the system sell at a huge loss assuring they could never recover from it with the PS3, (2) redesign the system and basically sit this generation out, or offset their release schedule and try to make the PS3 last 1.5 generations intead of 1 or (3) keep the price high and try to sell fewer units at first, then lower the price as manufacturing allows. They chose (3) because it would have the least impact on their third party partners who had PS3 projects in the works and plans to make PS3 games. If they all had to switch to 360 development, it would have been even worse for Sony.
Also, you are correct: I was just trying to say they pulled a lot of Wiis out of their asses last time. Typically one might use the phrase "white cheek" which probably makes more sense as that part of the body usually particularly untanned. Although more tanned Asians also tend to look darker and less yellow just as more tanned caucasians tend to look darker and less white. So perhaps it makes perfect sense.
