PS3 is not getting 'its butt kicked' by 360. Thats a very American-centric view.

They are neither good, nor accurate points.  He's ignoring the fact that Sony is trying to survive right now, not gain marketshare.  MS could deal with billion dollar losses because it is one of the largest corporations in the world with largest cash reserves.  Sony does not have that luxury.  When you guys choose to ignore facts like this, your posts make me think of a little kid covering his ears and yelling "NANANANA I CANT HEAR YOU NANANANA"

Apparently "American-centric" is a new synonym for "factual."  Funny stuff - 5 weeks of winning Japan, where the console market doesn't matter anymore, is enough to make people think the PS3 is actually competing.

They aim to sell 13 million this year, so it's guaranteed. Slim model at $300 for E3, that's what we're going to see.

"NANANANA I CANT HEAR YOU NANANANA" confirmed.

@Derek

The PS3 will get a price cut how much is hard to say and what form it will take.

It could come as a 50or 100 dallor cut or as a PS3 slim this is the only way they can meet their targets.

It will come no latter than oct. or very early nov.

That's not how a cost/benefit analysis works (if I understood your post correctly).

First of all, we can ignore the manufacturing cost reduction of the slim, since that will happen with or without the price cut (it just confuses things to include it). Second, you should only count software and accessories from the PS3 buyers who bought the PS3 because of the price cut, the other buyers would have given that profit with or without the price cut.

Two scenarios to explain what I mean:

Baseline scenario: No price cut, and Sony sells 9 million PS3s, and getting a certain profit from software/accessory sales. Specific numbers don't matter for a comparison, hence "baseline".

Price cut: A $100 price cut halfway through the year, when 4 million PS3s have already been sold. After the price cut, for the rest of the year 9 million PS3s are sold instead of 5 million (for a total of 13 million). So Sony loses $900 million compared to scenario 1 on the hardware side (this is the "cost side" of the analysis). Of course, more software is sold during the fiscal year due to the higher HW sales. Let's take your $80 profit estimate for the year. The additional userbase gained from the price cut is 4 million, which has the benefit of generating 4 million * $80 = $320 million. The $80 from the remaining 9 million is not counted, since that's also in the baseline scenario.

As you can see, the difference between the two scenarios is a $580 million loss. Of course there might be some additional savings from raising HW production volume, but that will certainly not eliminate all this loss.

Additional R&D and die costs would likely eliminate the savings completely, or even create more of a loss.

Thank you for typing the truth, hopfully someone will lisen..er..read it.

@Derek,Haggy

what you say is right a price cut should not happen.

But sony's own numbers seem to tell a different story I am not young and have been in retail most of my life and also have had my own business.

if sony is to meet their target a price drop seems very likely time will tell.