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CNN On The $500 PS3
Chris Morris reports in CNN's Game Over column that analysts have pegged the price point for the PS3 at $500. Despite the high price, you're getting a lot of tech for your buck. From the article: "The strongest argument behind the $499 price point is the PS3's inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive. This bleeding edge technology will give Sony significant bragging rights, but it comes at a cost. Pioneer last week at the Consumer Electronics Show unveiled a standalone Blu-Ray player for $1,800. Obviously, Pioneer's earning some profit there - and Sony will almost certainly subsidize the cost of the drives, but you're still looking at an expensive bit of hardware. The PS3 will also feature other pricey items, such as a hard drive, the Cell processor and a new graphics chip from nVidia."
$500!! What a bargain!! For a console that can not only play games on twin 1080p displays at 200fps, but can also be used to grill tasty steaks!
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
Bang for the buck, blah blah, but the mainstream target audience will never flock to this price point. What's worse is that the technology inside the PS3 ensures that the common competitive strategy of frequent price drops will be that much harder for Sony to stomach--are those Blu-Ray drives REALLY going to drop significantly enough to make MS's likely price cuts easy enough to match? Certainly, gaming hardware drops in price over time. That's a given. But this generation, Sony might not get to wait long enough before having its financial hand forced.
Aw, hell, pretty soon all I'll be able to afford for fun will be a stick and a metal hoop
The entire article is nothing but speculations about the price. The article even says they have no idea what the price will be and that it is all just guesswork; especially since Sony made no other comment than "...it's all just speculation".
Why is this considered front page news for Slashdot?
They'll make it up easy in game sales, even at standard pricing (around $50). All companies take a huge loss on consoles, and make the loss up on game revenues.
And with all the bad hardware news on the early Xbox 360 consoles, Sony will reap the rewards of coming in later, with a "more stable product". Not that the PS3 actually WILL be more or less stable... but since it comes out later, it will be likely be perceived by many to be "more heavily tested" before release.
I also don't think it will be end up priced at $500. More around $400, I'd think.
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$500 is the price of a basic deskop system. Its your average Dell machine, or the cheapest Lenovo machine.
For this money youre getting a CPU way better than most chips put into the Dells and Lenovos out there, and a graphics card to envy. Consoles have become more and more desktop-like, and the PS3 should be compared to high-end desktops. Give me a decent keyboard, mouse, possibly a PCI slot or ability to connect to most common networks, and an OS to work with and I'll call it a desktop.
The CPU however in itself is worth the pricetag. I'm considering getting the PS3, not for gaming at all, but to use as a linux desktop system running on 8 64-bit PPC cores, each of which runs at more than 2GHz. Go find that at $500.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Think about it. Even if Pioneer is just price gouging for the fun of it, 1800 is one hell of a gouge. I imagine that the controllers and most of the hardware is the same as a standard DVD player (well, more precise, perhaps). But a new kind of lens and obviously a way to produce a "blu-ray" to read with could be pretty pricey right now.
On the other hand, if Pioneer is making oh, $300 bucks on each, that's still a 1500 buck drive. Prices are not likely to drop much more than 30-40%, and Sony isn't likely to lose 500 bucks on the drive alone. Let's face it. Sony may have deep pockets, but even MS isn't stupid enough to gamble like that.
The way I see it, Pioneer better be super-gouging that price. (maybe it writes, I didn't catch anything about that). Sony and MS have both had major drive problems with exhisting tech, so this looks bad for the consumer. Real bad. And I've been drooling over the idea of a PS3 for a long time now.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Suppose they're right about Blu-ray. It takes off, even though Blu-Ray players drop say, half the price from $1800 to $900. Now the PS3 looks like a steal, right? What happens when people start buying PS3s just for Blu-ray players? Sure Sony can say we have over X million consoles in homes... but if only half of those owners actually end up buying more than one or two games a year, I think game manufacturers will catch on pretty quick. Installation of PS3s isn't the only thing Sony and its developers want... the people have to want to buy games too...
Despite the high price, you're getting a lot of tech for your buck.
I dont want a lot of tech for $500, I just want something that plays games that is affordable. Of course I am getting a Revolution, but I also want something that will play Metal Gear Solid 4 and some other sony-exclusive titles -and that will have to be a PS3. Make a machine that plays games and leave all the media extender dual 1080p output bullshit to the people who want it.
As far as video clarity goes Blu Ray & HD-DVD are going to fail unless they force studios to stop making DVD's. Read any of the CES coverage and you'll find 1080p plasmas running a Blu Ray/HD movie and the same set running a regular DVD on an upconverting dvd player.
Every one of them says the difference is hardly noticeable, slight bit of extra sharpness to the picture for the HD one. This is NOT the jump from VHS to DVD.
Other than for data storage these two formats are about 7-10 years ahead of when they'd really be needed.
Why they felt the need to try and push another new format on top of DVD is beyond me. Sounds like a pissing match that got out of hand. Where was the guy standing up in the meeting asking "Wait why are we spending time and tons of money on this right at this moment?"
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Memory cards will cost $1200. ;)
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
Compound this with the fact that the early games will be quick rewrites of last-gen titles... and remember: Netflix/Blockbuster will not be renting Blu-ray movies for a long while.
I have no doubt that in 2008, a sub-$300 PS3 will be an attractive purchase. By then, game coders will figure out how to program the Cell, and a decent catalog of Blu-ray movies will be available. Before then, though, buying a PS3 gets you bragging rights and little else.
As it happens, I'm planning a $500 investment in gaming hardware soon: a new mobo, CPU and graphics card. I'm confident that the results in 1600x1200 will look as nice as the PS3, and I won't be paying Sony to lock me out of using my hardware in the way that I see fit.
Pricing the PS3 below the price of the Xbox 360 (or at the same price as the $299 Core version) may very well sound the death knell for MS. As great as the Xbox 360 is in many things, it cannot in any way compete with a Blu-Ray player that is $100 less. Sony, not being smart, or perhaps not wanting to fight against cash-rich Microsoft or not wanting to lose out on automatic profit, won't go that route. They're also not giving pricing information out because they want to let the market figure out pricing. Obviously, people ARE willing to pay $700 for a console. (Check ebay the weeks after the 360). Sony could well sell the PS3 for $699 with a game and two controllers and wait 6 months for a price drop. I have no doubt that even at $999, it would sell like sugar-fried hotcakes. At least to the fanboys and/or early adopters. Is that a smart long-term strategy? No.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
You know, as I sit here and realize that we are all yammering on about how a $500 price point is too high, it strikes me that hundreds, if not thousands of Xbox360's changed hands on Ebay for well over $500 not a month ago. The non-core version is still selling for more than $500 in a few auctions.
We all know that the PS3 will blow the doors off the 360 (and some of us saw this @ CES), so where's the problem with the $500?
The simple truth is that if it hits at $500, and you want it, you'll buy it. And if there is a shortage, and you still want it, you'll pay $1000 for it on Ebay.
Its going to be the SAME thing here folks. Is it really that hard to remember what Sony did last time annd reflect that here?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I agree with previous posters that Sony could come out with the PS3 $999 and still sell out at launch, but they'd be crazy to do so. Even if they came out really high with the intention to drop the price significantly once sales to the hardcore fell off, the high initial price may have permanently scared off more casual buyers. Those casual buyers might even throw up their hands and spend their PS3 money on an Xbox 360. So if Sony launches at $499, they're taking a big risk on a console that will not have a lot of great games on launch (there simply isn't enough time) and for which there aren't going to be a lot of Blu-Ray movies either. To compete, I don't think they have any choice but to come out at no more than $399 in the U.S., likely more in Japan because they can get away with it there. Though, even in Japan, a high priced PS3 may not fly given that it will have to contend with a much cheaper Nintendo Revolution which is a bigger threat to them at home than Xbox 360.
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And if you look at history, pretty much all systems launch at about 400 dollars, adjusted for inflation.
This may sound odd, but Blu-Ray isn't that expensive once manufacturing is set up. Basically if Sony is willing to take a one-time hit to setup the manufacturing lines, and ignore sunk development costs, Blu-Ray shouldn't cost them much more than a standard DVD drive. However, those were costs Sony was planning on eating anyway to get Blu-Ray to be a popular standard, so it is really costing them nothing extra. Of course, Sony also plans to ship the PS3 will ship sans a HDD, which would be an extra 50 or so in material costs to put towards any special Blu-Ray manufacturing. (the article incorrectly claims the PS3 ships with a HDD, unless they know something we don't).
Chip fabs are also a sunk cost: it costs a stupid amount of money to setup a chip plant, but once you do the new ones cost about the same as the old ones. As Sony has been planning on making this chip standard in all of their electronics, that cost can also be counted against all of Sony's product lines once, and as such shouldn't cost the gaming division a bundle.
Sony has the advantage over Microsoft in this case in that they do a lot of consumer electronics manufacturing, and don't need to contract that out... they eat tooling costs once and can churn these things out cheaply. Microsoft has to pay for someone else to manufacture their stuff, and as such has tooling cost and profit added to each and every one of these that gets made for them.
In the article's defense it does say that analysts really don't know, and poses the theory that Sony may be faking everyone out and ship at a much lower price. Again, history has shown that the price will probably be about 400. Irrespective of manufacturing costs, Sony will find a way to make it about the same. Even if it were cheaper, Sony would probably sell it for about the same. That's the nature of console sales. Only Nintendo lowballs, and it doesn't seem to pay off for them anywhere but handhelds, as it destroys the illusion of value.
As a side note, I do wish that people would stop relying upon "analysts," as for the past few years analysts has been synnonymous with idiots. Those who can, do. Those who can't, analyze.
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