Thinking the same myself, I could have fun with something like that and I know enough people to actually be able to make something..and that's a good price for a dev kit.

Sony has to see your portfolio first, and also give you a license to develop on their platform.. so no personal dev kits sorry :P

is that good news? how good is it??

This is probably a long shot, maybe not.

Developers were crying for lower prices on the kits and lower price on the console.

Can anyone see Sony pulling the double whammy here?

WOWWWW. thats a big drop of price. good news. lets hope for more games now¡¡¡.

holy shit that's a big price reduction !

Dev Kits having a high price has nothing to do with them actually costing that much to make, it has everything to do with licensing and just one of several barriers for just anyone getting a hold of a dev kit.

This has nothing to do with a PS3 price cut.

Guess this means that development's alot easier than it was in 2006.

Think of it this way -- 40 devkits before this announcement cost $400K. Now they cost $100K. Some teams use closer to 80 devkits, some use more like 10-20. PSN titles probably get by with less than 10, for the most part.

Pretty cool for everybody.

Keep in mind there's a vast difference between a dev kit and a test kit, especially in price.  The only people that need dev kits are the actual programmers, everyone else (production, design, art, testing) only needs a test kit.  Test kits still cost a truckload of money, just not as much as a devkit.

Now the differences between a dev kit and test kit other than size (in the PS3's case at least), I forget.  I believe PS3 devkits have more memory and can also run the various debugging software while the test kit don't have the extra memory and don't run the extra debugging software but still run games from the hard drive or burned disc.  I could be wrong on that one, it's been a while since I cared.  >_>