Exactly NJ5. If you were an investor with Sony and they came to you and said "You know that $2Billion profit we said we were going to make? Well turns out Bob got the numbers wrong, we actually need $1Billion from you because we fooked up. Also we have decided to cut the price of the PS3, that way we no longer lose $50 a console we lose $150 a console, it's all good baby!" what would you do? If it was me i would think some mad guy was running the company and bail! The one thing that is for certain is if Sony price cut and cut by $100 they run the risk of going under or doing a Sega if they get it wrong.

hey if sony think they can squeeze in a price cut then they can cut the price! only they know their plans. anyway what about europe and stuff? theres one needed there for sure. i think its a bad idea to cut the price for sony so much at the start of the year, why? because microsoft may yet again cut the price at the end of the year just like this year. one price drop in april, then another at the end of the year.

edit: quoted the wrong one.

im sure sony wont cut the price until they are good to do so. this is just a prediction so it doesnt mean shit. also productions costs are going to go down big time in 2009. so maybe they can cut the price but only at by the end of the year.

If sales go well enough at the current price Sony could just do a $50 cut in April. Taking for true that now PS3 costs $299 to Sony (*), it should be going to stop losing money in USA right now, while it should have already stopped in EU. By April it should cost, if the current $299 is true, around $230, so a $50 cut could boost sales a little bit while it shouldn't make Sony lose again and would leave room for another $50 cut in Autumn.
MS reaction depends on XB360 sales, they have less possible cuts left and they must use them when necessary.
Nintendo won't really need to cut until it will be necessary to prevent Wii from being the most expensive, so not before mid 2010, Sony won't go under $250 before.
Obviously, should Sony accept to simply breaking even WW during Spring balancing initial small losses in USA with small gains in EU, it could cut $100 in April, but I guess shareholders would appreciate more PS3 to get a smaller sales boost in April, but with higher profits.

(*) not unlikely by Moore's law

If the PS3 could swing a $100 price cut in April, they could have swung a $50 cut over the holiday.

you clearly misunderstand moore's law. Moore's law only applies to processors and it only applies to increase in the number of transistors, not a decrease in price.

DS didn't have a pricecut, why should the Wii?

Edit:

@Tyrannical: True, but it could also be that when they saw MS' cut had such an effect it was too late to ramp up production and fully gather in their turn the fruits of a cut. Anyway a $100 cut in April would make Sony lose more money than now on consoles sold in USA (and earning nothing instead of a few euros in EU) for some months, it will take more than 3-4 months to cut costs by $100.

@omgwtfbbq: I oversimplified, Moore's law is only one of the factors, price cuts are consequence of Moore's law, other evolution of IC's, economies of scale, production process refining, etc. The cost of other components than CPU's also falls, GPU's have an obsolescence and cost fall even faster, HDD' cost falls fast, RAM speculations times are luckily long over and its price drops too, the only big cost remaining was that of the BD drive, but it's falling too, maybe a little slower.

Funny how Pachter 6 months ago was against MS cutting the price of the 360 (even though the xbox division was already profitable for almost a year) with the "excuse" of "lost profits" but now he is so in favour of sony cutting the price of the ps3 at a time when both sony as a whole and , i guess, the gaming division are bleeding money like crazy.

^^
The Tuck Pachter Hindsight Machine: zero defects.