PS2 Price May Fall, Gamecube Staying Put

mrquackers writes: "Looks like the price war in the console gaming world is starting a bit early. With Microsoft expected to announce a drop in the price of the Xbox to $199 next Monday at E3, Sony's rumored to be cutting PlayStation 2 prices as early as tomorrow. Meanwhile, Nintendo says it won't be making ANY price cuts before or during the show -- though it's not ruling one out for later in the year." Update: 05/14 18:01 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out this CNN story indicating that the PS2 cut is official.

Comments

But the really interesting part of the story..

[phaze3000]

Are that the ethernet and 56k modem adaptors will be sold for just $34.95 each. Nintendo were looking as thought they weren't going to bring these out previously so this is damn good news - finally PSO without loads of hacked-up charecters (hopefully...)

Re:Price dumping

[Graymalkin]

Where does this crap about Microsoft losing hundreds of dollars per console come from? Retarded slashdotnomics? The XBox is definitely not several hundreds of dollars worth of parts, especially for a manufacturer buying hundreds of thousands of each component. Integrated components are scores cheaper than non-integrated components. A processor slow by current standards on a fully integrated motherboard with a hard drive easily produced and procured from several different sources lacking price gouging components like speakers, a monitor, or a KB/mouse combo all make for a pretty inexpensive machine to build. A bare bones PC costs about as much as an XBox and they use more exepensive components. Besides Microsoft isn't paying the beaucoup fees to ship units overseas, they have manufacturing plants on the three continents they sell XBoxes on.

Console makers have always taken a loss on the initial batches of the consoles as a matter of course, the games were the money makers. Half of the cost of a new game goes back into the pockets of whoever makes the console. It costs a bit of money to have that Sony Entertainment or Nintendo logo pop up when the game starts. The consoles merely existed to play the games on. When a console maker hit black they'd drop the price of the console to just above cost and soak up the profit from licensing. Sony has been making a profit off the PS2 for a while now because with the XBox aiming at the same demographics the price of the PS2 hasn't needed to drop. They've sold millions of PS2s and made many more millions off all the blockbuster games for it. Microsoft might be taking a small loss or just operating on a razor thin margin with the XBox but they're not losing hundreds of dollars per freaking console.