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PS2 Price Cut On The Way?
GameDailyBiz reports on analyst predictions of an upcoming PS2 price cut. From the article: "Although some analysts have said a price cut to $99 for the aging console would be a possibility, Sebastian believes the cut would be a more moderate $20 drop. 'We now believe a price cut on Sony's PS2 is more than likely ahead of the E3 video game conference. Specifically, our industry checks indicate that Sony is planning to cut the PS2 price to $129 from the current $149 before the end of this month,' he said."
That's not an entirely fair comparison, a PC with a graphics engine is considerably easier for an amateur developer to work with than a PS2. If the PS2 was OSSed, I'd expect some emulator engines (ScummVM, NES, SNES) to pop up (along with shady side businesses selling emulator+roms) and maybe a few demos and trivial games, but that's about it. Maybe, maybe, a few years down the road we get a couple of decent homebrew games and a bunch of niche games and ports, but I wouldn't expect to see an explosion of user developed content. The PS2 is just to hard to develop for. While it might be kind of fun to see tuxracer running on a PS2, it's pure novelty.
I could see Sony releasing a PS1 development environment for free now, since it'd be a decent teaching tool and wouldn't cut into their profit margin (nobody licenses the PSx development engine anymore AFAIK), but even that is a bit of a streach.
I read the internet for the articles.
I love this. Everytime someone says "PS2 was sold at a loss", someone turns around and says that this is groupthink and a myth. Then they "prove" it by linking to a blog with zero references (quite ironic). Seems to me like everyone is off their "gord".