There's no evidence for that. Again, where were you guys all these years ago? May 2002. PS2 Price cuts, could have price cut more if they wanted to. Xbox has to price cut and this was 6 months after launch. The Xbox was already selling for a loss at 300 dollars, manufacturing was more expensive, and not coming down yet in the young life cycle. Just cause Xbox price cut 100 bucks Sony didn't respond by going even lower, and Niether did Nintendo, though they both could have. Even the PS2 now still costs around 120 bucks in parts. Just because you've been around a long time doesn't mean the cost of parts goes to 0. Nintendo actually has less room to price cut proportionally to the other 2 systems. How much does a GC cost? 99 bucks? Only half of the original cost. The fact of the matter is the systems usually only cut price about 1/2 to 2/3 of the original cost over the whole life cycle of the product. Think about it. It doesn't make sense as a business to lower your price when you can continue to sell good levels. Which both Nintendo and 360 are right now. In all the console wars there have been price cuts, but they usually respond to timing and not for price wars. The only exceptions are when there is no choice. i.e. May 2002 Xbox price cuts to 200 bucks cause of PS2 price cut. They simply did not have a choice because they were already dominated and at 300 bucks to 200 it would have been even worse. You think Nintendo is going to cut to 1/2 in the first 6 months of life when 360 price drops? 360 will drop by the usual. 100 dollars, that's par for the course. PS3 will drop 100, and I bet Wii probably drops 50. Then the next price cut will occur with normal business cycle.

I would argue 64 might be the one system that lost on graphics. I mean comeon, it did have great games, but graphics wise it was horrid compared to a system that came out 2 years later? Who remembers the 64 Blocks that made up James bond in golden eye and the picture plastered on their flat faces? Also Sony moved to CD which was what PC devs were using which helped them on the developer side. Nintendo is always trying crazy formats 64Bit Cartrige? MiniDisc? Actually very few mainline gaming systems have failed. The Saturn, The Dreamcast, and NeoGeo come to mind. The Dreamcast sales were so much worse than even the PS3 sales its no secret to see why it died. How is SCEA not going to do first party support? Of course they are, SCEA is the 3rd biggest developer studio in the world behind Ubisoft and EA. I just don't think a price cut is as far away as you all do because of outside circumstances that are going to force a price cut.

In raw processing power (and in supported features) the N64 was dramatically more powerful than the Playstation or Saturn; the unfortunate thing is that certain limitations (cartridge size, maximum texture size ammount of available ram, etc.) caused a lot of trouble for most developers. The best looking games on the N64 looked far better than anything that was available for the playstation, but the majority of games were never able to come close to the potential of the system. The Gamecube on the other hand was designed less for maximum theoritical performance and Nintendo focused on maximum real-world performance and produced a system that had the best performance/cost ratio in the generation. Edit: A way to think about it would be, imagine that Sony cut all memory (including on-chip cache) by 75% and used UMD as their game format ... Their best games would look amazing but most developers would have trouble producing games that looked better than Wii games ...

Nobody said you had to believe Sony, I wouldn't. And yes it's obvious that pre-announcing a price cut would be suicide, I don't think Sony is that stupid. I'm just pointing to Sony's official stance instead of speculating. I agree if the 360 drops, it will force Sony's hand and they will probably have to drop their price as well. But it is not a fact that MS will drop their price, did I miss some press release? Is MS that stupid to pre-announce a price cut. I think it is likely there will be a 360 price cut sometime this year, it would make sense to try and undercut your competitors if you can. But I don't think it's a fact. Stromprophet, as someone who seems to be clamoring for evidence this entire thread where is yours to back up your fact. I think you are in the majority of people, both Sony lovers and Sony haters are expecting a price cut from Sony soon within the next year and a half. They may be forced to by a 360 cut, or they may have to do it to try and stimulate sales.

ORLY? PS3 is a bit ahead of DC in Japan at this point, but add that to the US sales and they're neck and neck BTW, the Neo Geo was never a "mainline gaming system". The Saturn was #2 in Japan and Sega's most successful console in that region - hardly an outright failure. That distinction belongs to the Jaguar or anything Atari after the 2600, save home computers. Oh, and the PCFX.

I agree with you. My main point was that it'll be quite some time before the PS3 sees a price cut, and with the way the other two systems are doing, they can comfortably hold on to a price cut until it's needed to counter Sony's.

or if ninty wants t kill off the ps3 quickly drop it within a year out. if ninty does this and bundles a second game the ps3 will die quickly cause of price.

Let me see if I understand you. Your argument is that a PS3 price cut won't trigger a 360 price cut, and as evidence for this you offer that a PS2 price cut did trigger an Xbox price cut? Um, okay. The simple reality of the thing is that console buyers have proven to be very, very price-sensitive. Sony is obviously seeing this firsthand with the dismal sales of its $499/$599 PS3, but so is Microsoft, with the merely okay sales of the 360 at $299/$399. Microsoft knows, obviously, that if they want to be a big mass-market console like the PS2, they need to be cheaper. And the 360 is in a position now where they can sensibly be cheaper -- around the holidays, estimates were that they were making $75 per unit (looking just at component costs of the box itself and ignoring everything else); the upcoming 65nm die shrink will put them in an even better place, cost-wise. They're going to reduce the price of the box before the holidays, and the only question is when and by how much. (My guesses are May and $100, based on the discounts that were being given out before the holidays, plus a bigger hard drive.) Meanwhile, Sony will not be able to ignore this. The 360 and the PS3 are basically identical consoles in terms of hardware performance, Blu-Ray isn't a feature that sells beyond a small enthusiast market right now (the HD-DVD drive for the 360 sold 100K units, which strikes me as very plausible as a rough sizing of the market that is interested in buying game consoles for HD movie playback at the moment), and the 360's game portfolio is undeniably superior to the PS3's (a situation that's guaranteed to be true at any point in 2007). So Sony has to drop the price... but how can they? According to those same analysts, they were losing $240 per unit (again, just looking at component costs) during the holidays. Now, they're going to shrink those costs over time. Microsoft was able to cut the 360's cost by 38% by a year after launch, so assume Sony can do the same. This puts the PS3's cost in November at around $500 (for the expensive one, but the cheap one is only $30 less right now, and that'll narrow over time). Which means that if they cut the price by $100, they'll be still losing money on the cheap unit and almost breaking even (considering only component cost of the console) on the expensive one. Two things about this: 1. It's bad for Sony. Microsoft lost billions of dollars on the Xbox, which wasn't something that pleased higher management or the stockholders. The Xbox project was approved on much rosier assumptions, and if Gates and Ballmer had realized how it would really go, they probably wouldn't have gone ahead with it. (The 360, coming off the fiscal fiasco of the first Xbox, was designed with costs and profitability much more in mind.) Even so, Microsoft has reliable cash cows in Office and Windows, so can afford to toss around a few billion in losses here and there if it means entry into a strategic market. Sony's not in that position, and they really want to make money off the PS3. They're not going to pull a Microsoft and stay in the red if they can help it at all. 2. It doesn't really help the PS3. If both the 360 and the PS3 drop $100, now you've got two next-gen consoles: The 360 for $199/$299, and the PS3 for $399/$499. The cost of entry for Sony's console is twice as high as for Microsoft's, and the price difference between similar tiers has gone up as a percentage of the price. (That is, $599 is 50% more than $399, but $499 is 66% more than $299.) People who are price-conscious are even more likely to buy the 360 over the PS3 after they each have $100 drops. If the PS3 really wants to be competitive with the 360, it needs to cost the same. (Even then, I think the 360 is the better buy, but "the PlayStation brand," as Sony likes to remind us, still has some cachet, and I suspect it'd be a real fight.) But there's no way Sony can afford to drop its price by $300, which means that it can't compete with the 360 on an even price footing, which means Sony desperately needs to convince everyone that the PS3 is not only as good as the 360, but that it's hundreds of dollars better, price drop or no price drop.

mk dont forget the wii in there i think that is what has suprised both M$ and $ony. ninty has gotten the non gamer lookin and wanting which the ps2 had in its hayday. with the wii's get off the couch and have fun wiimote that is whats appealing parents and everyone else to get a wii. they say more and more kids are getting obese and sitting on couch's and playing videogames more and more. ninty has come up with the perfect way to get them off the couch excersizing without realizing they are excersizing. so parents are happy, and playing and the whole family values thing is there. but with the ps3 and xbox360 all they see is fat kids playin games on expensive game machines and doesnt sit well and confusing controls baffles older and younger gamers so it shuts off the need for those kind of machines. the GC was a game machine and it did poorly compared to the xbox and ps2 cause of the non gamer factor