Ok, I have to say, spending $400 for an Xbox 360 made me cringe. It’s a nice console, but $400 for a game-playing piece of plastic is little on the crazy side. So, what does Sony do? I guess you could say they took it one step further. The official pricing for the PS3 has been released and its $500 for a “core” version (to put it in MS terms) and $600 for the uber version. I think, just as with the Xbox 360 core version, most will see the $500 PS3 as not worth buying and opt for the $600 version. Six hundred friggin’ dollars.
Add that to the weirdness surrounding the controller, and I think you have a pretty awkward announcement. If you haven’t heard, it sounds as if Sony has added a tilt-sensor in the controller for use games. Picture tilting the controller back to mimick tilting the throttle on your aircraft back. It could be fun, but hardly as neat as the controller the Nintendo Wii will come with. So, I guess you have to wonder why? Why throw this in if it were only to be compared to the superior Wii controller?
There is no doubt that the PS3 will be a beast. But, will the price hurt Sony? Will it turn out that trying to leverage control of next-generation optical media by forcing its console customers to pay more for a Blu-Ray equipped PS3 was a mistake? Will Blu-Ray go the way of the Betamax and UMD? I guess we will know more come this holiday season.
No it will not hurt Sony seeing as when the PS2 came out in limited numbers, people were paying $2000 to get one.
We will pay the price. Okay I won’t since I don’t have that much money with Anya around, but people will pay it easy.
Right, but the next-gen wars won’t necessarily be decided by the diehard MS or Sony fanboys. It will be decided by the mothers and fathers of more casual gamers. That is where things will become more interesting.
Who do you think was shelling out the $2000 grand for their spoiled little kid?
People paying thousands for consoles on release tells us nothing. They did the same thing for the 360. Once we get past that and onto the sales numbers at 1 year after launch, that’s when we get to see what’s happening.
And to be honest, I think going over the $500 mark for the real version of the console is going to kill Sony. Absolutely kill them. It’s a huge mental barrier, $500 is.
Yeah it porbably will which is why I’ll wait for it to crash down to a more reasonable price.
I am not so convinced it will kill them, but I certainly don’t think they have handled the PS3 launch as well as they should. Seems to me there is a lot of last minute crap that smells of poor planning (oh crap, people like online gaming, lets throw that in, oh crap, they don’t like the boomerang, oh crap people are raving about nintendo’s controller, if MS can pull off a worldwide launch, etc). They just don’t seem to be behaving much like the leader in consoler gaming at all.
Except, you know, in their interviews, where they try to convince you that dicking around with no idea what you’re doing was their plan all along, and is in fact something to be expected from someone who rewlz the console business.
Did I mention how much I love Nintendo playing coy? They’ve clearly defined themselves as being pretty much in a different market as the 360/PS3, and can now kind of do whatever they feel like, including come to E3 and say the Wii will be out “in Q4, at somewhere under $500″.
Great! So you’re saying that people will still buy the PS3 if it costs $2,000 then? Quick, somebody call Sony and tell them to raise the price!
As Dave already pointed out, consoles need to sell in volume. The fact that a few people are willing to pay large sums of money to purchase a new console immediately after its launch doesn’t help Sony a bit, since they need to sell millions of units, not hundreds. The vast majority of people interested in buying a PS3 can’t afford to spend $2,000 to buy a new console, to pick a number at random. Can they afford to spend $500? More importantly, will they bother to spend $500 when you can get the Xbox for a hundred dollars less, meaning that you can afford a second contoller and a game for $500? As Colin said, we’ll found out come Q1 of next year (the PS3 will not be available in any kind of volume here in the states until next year — don’t kid yourselves).
Every PS3-related press release to date has made Sony look the fool. Not to hold up Microsoft as a paragon of virtue or anything, but the Xbox 360 has had consistent marketing from the get-go, AFAICR. Sony’s mixed up messages make it look like they don’t even know what the console will be able to do, which is confusing for both consumers and developers. How’d you like to be told, years into the development of your game, months before console launch, that you suddenly need to include support for network play using an API provided by Sony — one that may not even work yet?
The PS3 had better be able to brew beer for me, because otherwise, I’m probably going to skip it — and unlike both of the last PlayStation incarnations, there will not be a sexy new Final Fantasy sequel on the platform to lure me into a purchase (FF7 and FF10 were basically the only reasons I got either of the last two Sony consoles).
“As Dave already pointed out, consoles need to sell in volume.”
Gee thanks for that incredible piece of information there, how silly of me to overlook it.
No f’ing shit they need to sell in volume. I was using the $2000 grand thing to make the point that people who really, really want the system will pay whatever Sony wants for it. XBox360genocidemachine could have done the same thing if they wanted to.
As for Final Fantasy for PS3, FFXIII has been confirmed for development, and there is talk of remaking FFVII for the PS3.
The question was “will the higher price hurt sales for Sony”, and you answered, “it will not hurt Sony seeing as when the PS2 came out in limited numbers, people were paying $2000 to get one.”
Which, as you just confirmed, is totally fucking bogus, because a few people paying exorbitant sums for a console means nothing when we’re asking about the total volume of sales. So it doesn’t matter if “people who really, really want the system will pay whatever Sony wants for it”, it matters if people who would have purchased it choose an Xbox instead because of the price difference, dick-ass.
Re: Final Fantasy, if Final Fantasy XII is any indication of where they are going with the series, I’ll pass — the “action” combat system in Final Fantasy X-2 was bad enough.
‘dick-ass’?
J, you’re my hero.
That’s why Sony relies on people like me who know the XBox is a piece of shite.