Another huge factor is Nintendo's expenses are minimal. They have 3700 employees compared to Sony's 180,000 employees. They don't have big offices and facilities around the world. All those things are huge ongoing expenses that can't be shed easily.

Doubt it. Isnt the PS3 just starting to cut even? Wasnt it selling at a loss for close to 2 yrs?

Since the yen is strong a price cut in Japan is actually more painful (on a per-unit basis).

The real reason why a price cut in Japan could come earlier is that sales are lower there, so overall it's less painful to cut the price there.

Indeed, sales have not been too bad as of late and a price cut + RE5, SF4, FFXIII, Yakuza 3 etc will do well in finishing off 360 in Japan, well it's already finished. Japan is very small in terms of importance for sales these days, for example UK is much bigger.

ummmm.... i really don't think it will have a price cut in 2009, honestly
things are a bit bad for Sony...but who cares..i would most likely get a PS3 in 2009

hum,

I still think they will do a price cut at least for 50$

Remember that in 2009 PS3 hardware will stop being sold at loss ...

After all, price cut = "more market share for later" and since they are saving a bit money with their "NO price cut in 2008" behaviour, I expect a price cut in 2009.

Maybe in Japan but not in the U.S. if the exchange rate stays the same.

Worse is what happens if the Dollar drops even further against the Yen?

@gebx: It hasn't stopped dropping yet on a 3-month moving average (red line in the graph):

Again this is bullshit. I don't know who is manufacturing each PS3 part. But most likely its pretty much identical to the 360. Processor from IBM(USA?), GPU from NVIDIA(Taiwan?), put together in China? and so on and so forth. Yen-Dollar conversion may lower their profits in yen but it hardly makes manufacturing a PS3 more expensive for them. At least not much.

I don't think anyone said PS3 manufacturing is getting more expensive.