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How the PS3 Hit $600
Joystiq has up an interesting article today, gathering together information from a couple of places to discuss why the PlayStation 3 is so expensive. From the article: "Kutaragi was demoted after being passed over for the role of CEO and, when former Sony Pictures head Howard Stringer assumed the position, the relationship between the content and technology divisions of Sony became even more intimate. Stringer "quickly dubbed the PlayStation 3 as one of the company's 'champion' products." Kutaragi's desire to stratify the console market with Cell technology in effect wed Sony to the unpalatable prospect of charging an unprecedented price. Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format, the final price was escalated by two very advanced (and very expensive) pieces of Sony technology."
The number one reason Sony's PS3 is so expensive is because they are not customer based anymore, they are "theory" based.
The DRM Rootkit seemed like a good idea in "theory".
A $600 game system seems like a good idea in "theory".
In theory I'm not going to buy the PS3, and neither will billions of other humans because of the price.
Oh You POS
I'm really scared for the PS3. I remember reading a recent comment on /. earlier about Sony's last-minute motion-senseing controller reeking of upper management mandating that said feature go into the product. I have a feeling that this same upper management is going to severely harm what was once a pretty sweet console.
-- n
I have inside information from Sony Electronic Entertainment (posting anonymously for obvious reasons) that yields on some of the components like the graphics chip and Blu-Ray controller chipset are as low as 20-30%. In conjunction with those being new and revolutionary technologies only manufactured in a handful of factories in southeast Asia will no doubt contribute to the $649 price point. Oops, did I just reveal something I shouldn't have? ;)
Again... because its technology is too cutting edge and too new and therefore too expensive, would have been much better to go with cheap commodity stuff rather than daring to push the boundaries and actually put some THOUGHT into the product.
But what got me most was this
Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format.
If the PS3 gets reasonable marketshare then this could be considered its master stroke in 2 years time. While the XBox 360 will need a revision to support HD discs, the PS3 won't.
But what irritates me most is the phrase "their proprietary Blu-ray format". I must have missed the bit where the MS Supported HD-DVD was an open standard with no strings attached. So Sony created an HD disc standard, just like they worked with Phillips on CDs and have created several other professional and consumer format standards, some which flew, some which didn't.
Its a sad state of affairs when Slashdot articles don't even celebrate the invention and the investment, but bitch just about the price and want LESS gadgets in the box, and when the MS supported standard is implicitly suggested to be a more "open" option.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What Sony management does not seem to realize is that the American middle class will pay a premium only if the product offers premium quality. Nowadays, I do not see much difference, in quality, between a Sony electronic gadget and, say, a Panasonic electronic gadget. I refuse to pay the Sony premium. Increasingly, other potential and current Sony customers refuse to pay a premium without a corresponding premium in quality. For the year ending on 2006 March 31, the electronics divison of Sony lost $0.6 billion ($1.1 billion - $1.7 billion).
If Sony maintains the $600 price tag, Sony will lose the gaming console market to Microsoft. Armed with a well-funded research division, Microsoft poses a formidable threat to Sony.
P.S.
Curiously, with the fading away of Bell Laboratory as the premier industrial laboratory, Microsoft's research division now assumes the mantle of America's #1 industrial laboratory. It is certainly the coziest laboratory, funded by an almost limitless supply of money from Microsoft.
Sorry in advance, but...
I think the sphere where one or the other (or both) will really take off is in computing devices. True, there are still a lot of people out there who don't even have DVD burners (nevermind dual layer DVD burners), but I can see the need for very large offline storage capacity by computer users ensuring that one or both of these standards does indeed take off. Who wouldn't want a single disc that can store up to 200GB of data (which, according to WikiPedia is the current maximum achieved thus far -- whether or not such discs will be available to the general public anytime soon at a reasonable price is anyones guess)?
We'll quickly get to a point where a variety of device types will be manufactured and released that use either standard -- computer optical drives, game consoles, video players -- and it only takes one of these to really take off for the others to follow (as there is a certain cost savings and end-user convienence in the long run to have all of these devices using compatible storage technologies). Indeed, assuming production of the 405nm blue-violet lasers really ramps up, we may get to a point where the red lasers needed for DVDs and CDs is actually more expensive to manufacture, at which point people needing to replace older equipment will simply go with the newer standard (particularly if the units in question are backward compatible, or in situations where backwards compatibility is unnecessary).
I personally don't care about BlueRay or HD-DVD for video at this point -- I have a very nice Standard-Def TV, and don't really have the spare cash laying around to replace it with an HD unit. I likewise don't currently care about them for gaming -- my PS2 still works just fine, and has a ton of really good games I haven't finished exploring as it is (as I rarely have time to sit down and play much of anything as it is). However, being able to dump 25GB (or more) of data to a single optical disc on my computer does appeal to me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to the day when Apple starts including BlueRay drives in their MacBooks (hopefully that day will come before the next time I need to upgrade my system :) ).
Yaz.
Yaz.
Just set a price. A DECENT price. $400.
Then say "the first two shipments will be sold all on eBay by us. Bidding starts now."
The fanboys and early adopters who are willing to shell out will drive all the systems up to $900 or more. Sony will sell 'em all, they'll make a profit (surely PS3s don't cost THAT much to make), and those of us who will wait for a more reasonable price will get it later.
Instead, they're charging EVERYONE $600. They will sell fewer to "normal" people, and they won't get any of those insane profit margins that eBaying the first two shippment would get them. Sony is worse off, the average joe is worse off.
It's simple economics. If you have a hot product, why fuss with stores and go straight to a market decided price (with a minimum, of course) by eBaying them for a while. I'm sure eBay would cut you a huge deal on the auction.
Heck, you're Sony. You can auction them yourself off your site.
But instead of charging $400 and getting tons of proffit from the people willing to pay $1500, you're charging $600 and getting a large loss.
Genius.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Well, you're right to a certain extent ... Early adopters are willing to pay more for a product than the average consumer. I'm an early adopter and if asked by Sony's marketing team wheter I was able to afford a new console at $600 or whether I was willing to pay $600 for a new console I would probably say yes to both questions; but I still think Sony is screwed.
You see inspite of me being able to afford the system, and inspite of me willing to pay the price tag, I'm really not willing to spend that much money on the PS3. The facts are as follows:
- I'm not that interested in HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until one of them demonstrates some sort of market dominance
- The PS3 is not producing games at a graphicaly (or any technical way) better than the XBox 360
- Every PS3 game I am interested in has only been shown in video form, is at least 12 months (more likely 18 months) away and in many cases is multi-platform
I personally see absolutely no reason to own a PS3, thus the $600 price tag will prevent me from buying it; had it been $200-$400 I may have picked it up for the coolness of owning a new gadget or to play some of the average titles that seem to be coming out for it. At $600 Ì'll just pick up some 10 more games for my PS2/Gamecube or the Wii I will own.
At this point I feel that the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray debate is going to go the way of laserdisc.
Everyone will know that the quailty is better but most people won't care, at least common people who buy the large flat panel TVs and watch content with the wrong aspect ratio on it.
Videophiles will buy it along with the $80 HDMI cables but I don't ever seem to remember Wal*mart carring any title on laserdisc in their stores.
I thought I was going to buy into the HD formats but it is a mess right now to the point that I just don't care anymore about it.
As somewhat of a purist, I was waiting for SED units with 1080p but at this point, if I have to buy a new TV (because my color is starting to fade), I will settle for 720p and stick with regular DVD's.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
When only 15% of American households have HD, going with an ultra expensive storage format only intended for a niche market is not a smart thing. When they don't have HDTVs, consumers can't see any benefits to warrant such a high price, and they'll save their money for something else.
But for video, I think I'm smack dab in the target market for a HiDef DVD, (60" Sony LCoS, home theater, etc), yet I don't see the need to re-buy all my DVD's and ditch my rather nice up-converting DVD player just yet, at the very least until one side or the other sorts itself out as the winner and even then there's a fair chance I'll wait and rely on whatever pure digital format is available.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
If you want to back-up that amount of data, you already have tape drives today that can do up to 1TB/tape.
IBM supposedly found a way to get 1TB/mm data density on tape as well, and should be releasing a drive and tapes here in the next few years with > a petabyte of capacity.
Optical has advantages(and disadvantages) over tape, sure. Just saying, if you have a legitimate need to back-up that amount of data, you already have a way to do so.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
You are wrong. While game licensing is in fact where most of the profit comes from, consoles are not sold at a loss except in unusual circumstances.
An example of the unusual circumstances under which consoles are sold at a loss might be: Sony, historically, has sold its consoles at a loss for a very short period of time at each launch, but targets their prices such that a few months to a year after launch (as manufacturing prices go down) they will be making at least a small profit off of each unit sold.
The idea that selling at a loss is "normal" is an urban myth; in fact we only see consoles being sold at a loss as a "normal" thing in the case of the XBox line, which is frankly a business disaster and has totally failed to earn enough in game licenses to make up for the money lost on the systems themselves.
I see a lot less parents spending the money on a PS3
When I was a kid, video games were the only way my parents could get any "them time". They tried locking my little brother & I out of the house, but we just climbed in the windows when we got hungry. Then they tried a Nintendo, worked like a charm.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
There is a great desire among slashdotters to see Sony fail. They can't really fault the hardware so they got to focus on the price and common sense be damned.
The PS3 not having as innovative a controller as the Wii. Neither does the 360. You don't hear people about that.
The cell is actually a really powefull piece of tech so you can't make claims that it is underpowered or something.
The PS3 will fail or succeed based on wether it can have games that are worth the price. Can the hardware be put to real use and can we get games that blast anything on the 360/PC away? So far nothing is showing up that impresses me but then none of the consoles impress me.
The games don't really have to innovative. Give me F.E.A.R and just use that massive CPU to put 60 ai's in the game at the same time. That would sell me. Well if I can use a mouse with it.
Oh just give me a PS3 with linux and an open spec to the hardware.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
large bulk data storage should not be done on optical meda.
it already takes ages to burn off 4.4 gigs onto single layer dvd-rs.
how long will it take for 25-45 gigs?
then once you get it off.. all your eggs are in one very fragile and irrepairable disk.
dogs step on it and *snap* its gone. oh you wanted to update that rough draft of a book you backed up? too bad, you now have to burn back 45 gigs of data!
I'm going with firewired hard drives or multivolume parity based raid arrays when my needs exceed the bounds of traditional dvd-rs. at least then i can maintain, alter, and repair my data once it's moved off my main system.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think the PS3 is coming out at just the right time and price point for Sony. HDTVs are flying off the shelves now, this being the first year HDTV sales exceed analog TV. The point of Blu-Ray in the very near future will be as a strong competitor to going to the Movie Theater. In fact if Blu-Ray truly supports 1080P and not just 1080P upconverted from 24fps but full-blown 60fps then in many/most cases the viewing experience will be far better than your average Ciniplex.
I've said this before, but I'll say it again. If Sony really wants to get early adopters on board they should try to get the IMAX catalog converted to 60fps 1080P as quickly as possible, that and start shooting new movies in 60fps in an IMAX-lite version -- it would be fairly easy to adapt 24fps cinema equipment to 60fps. Pans would loose their jitter, double vision look. Action sequences would seem more realistic.
Now it maybe that some future hyper-internet will support HDTV on demand, but for the next 5 years Blu-Ray will offer the best cheapest delivery system despite what Bill Gates has to say on the subject -- that and Hollywood's reluctance to distribute on anything other than a physical medium.
One last note about visual quality, I recently watched "Passage to India" (shot in 70mm) in HDTV. The quality was glorious. This because the graininess of standard 35mm confuses HD compression and robs the final mpeg of the resolution it is really capable of. Films shot either direct to HD, with HD-video cameras, or converted from 70mm prints really show the real potential image clarity of HD. Hollywood will soon have to start factoring image quality of HD viewing into account when shooting new content.
Letter To Iran
"what was once a pretty sweet console."
What pretty sweet part are we talking about? 2 HDMI ports I can't use without a 2,000$ new TV? 7 player bluetooth, when I rarely (never) have a situation where I go, "damn, I wish my GameCube had 8 ports so everyone could play Mario Party instead of just 4 at a time"? The part where the PS3 is also an Internet router, instead of my current one, with 3 gigabit ports?
Sony went and said, "everything those guys have, plus EXTRA!" for the past 3 years. Like the online service, next generation graphics, or any of that other shit I mentioned.
Every year, Sony Fan Bois have been going, "OMG CREAM" about it. There is no such thing as a sweet Sony console; it's always a pack of lies. The only reason the PS1 got popular was because everyone hated pompous Nintendo and their "screw everyone" mentality in the mid-1990s. How many 1st party titles (and I don't mean 2nd party, like Polyphony Digital) have there been on the PS1 and PS2 that have been super awesome? How does that number compare to the titles by 3rd party developers?
Sony sells far less PS1s and PS2s than Square Enix, Namco, Capcom, or Konami -- even alone. Hell, the only thing the semi-rational fan bois seem to want on the PS3 is Metal Gear 4 -- a Konami title.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You might think I'm clueless, but you should pay attention if you want to know how this is going to go.
I'm 40 years old and I've never owned a game console. Does that make me clueless? No, I've seen other consoles but I've been waiting for a networked enabled version that's really up to PC based gaming. Xbox was not it and the whole line will never will be more than a second rate PC.
We'll see if PS3 sucks or not. When it comes out, I'll walk down to a store and have a look. The descriptions so far look like a winner, no matter what crazy things we might imagine happen inside Sony's corporate headquarters. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what it's like to work inside a huge company that speaks a language I can't read or speak. My only doubts come from the fact that it will be non free, even though IBM's got all sorts of SDK for cell and it's going to run a Linux kernel. I can put up with a non free set top box if it works well enough. What really matters is what's delivered. At that point, I just might spend the few hundreds of bucks I have not wasted on Xbox and ultra expensive wintel video cards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
PS2 production couldn't face the demand during the first months. I'm maybe naive :-) but...Maybe they set the price at $600 to face the demand and few months later they will drop the price to challenge the XBOX 360.
;-).
Only fools, fanatics or wealthy people will buy it at such a price.
Anyway I may consider it...If it has a keyboard, a mouse, a VGA/DVI output, USB to a printer and a well known operating system with tons of applications (ie: if it is a PC).
The only console right now that fits to my budget is the Wii. I'm 30, working, a nice job...Bu I've got a house to pay, a car to pay...Blue ray or not
In addition, over a quarter of these gamers said they wanted DVD (or HD-DVD, Blu-Ray or whatever) playback in their console. However, they weren't questioned about the price point for a PS3, so I don't know if they would change their tune once they saw the cost!
Because the point of MS Research is not to create products. The point of MS Research is just to employ the best and brightest minds in the business-- for the sole purpose of tying them all up, so they aren't somewhere else creating brilliant projects that would eventually turn into Microsoft competitors. Microsoft doesn't want researchers. They just don't want anybody else to have researchers. Researchers are dangerous, every once in a great while they create innovative ideas, and new ideas change markets, and change is bad if, like Microsoft, you derive your power from stasis.
Better to keep all the brilliant minds fat and lazy, busy being highly paid to contemplate their navels and concentrate on extracting sunlight from cucumbers, instead of letting them run around loose in the real world where they might do something scary like trying to change it.
You ever read Brave New World? Remember, at the end, what it turned out they really did with all of the political dissidents...?
Sure, $600 is quite expensive, and I doubt I'll be getting one in any hurry. but I'm not sure it's overpriced for what you're getting...
Plenty of people have pointed out that the PS3 will double as a Blu-ray movie player, and at launch it will probably be cheaper than the first round of standalone players; but not everyone cares about HD movies.
But what about the reports that:In addition to being a fairly radical departure from Sony's current position on homebrew (eg PSP), this could put the PS3 into a different category to the other consoles -- the potential to be a general purpose home computer, out of the box.
Sure, the PS2 had a Linux addon kit available... for about $200 extra. This got you Linux, a hard drive, a keyboard & mouse, plus a special video adapter was required so you could use a monitor. You also needed to pony up for a memory card dedicated to Linux (there's another $20 or so). Even then you couldn't access some of the basic hardware, like the optical drive, and the PS2 hardware is kind of limited for general purpose use: it only has 32MB memory and a ~300MHz CPU.
The PS3, on the other hand, will come with Linux and the HDD as standard. Any USB keyboard and mouse should work. It's got a very powerful CPU, and 512MB memory. HDMI will give you monitor resolutions (you could even use a DVI adapter to connect to an actual monitor). For that $600, you're getting the next generation Sony console, but you may also be getting quite a reasonable living-room PC as well...
This is all prerelease specs, so it may not turn out this way... but if it does, maybe the PS3 isn't so overpriced after all?
From what I know, only HDMI/DVI are going to get you 1080p and bandwidth being limited you'll only get 30FPS on those cables.
That is incorrect. Do a search on AVSForums or other AV forums (like this post). Component cables actually offer significantly more bandwidth than is required for even 1080p (can handle up to 2048x1200, or something along those lines). There are TV's on the market today (a Westinghouse model for one) that does 1080p from component inputs, in the thread I pointed to a Barco is mentioned.
I have read that a number of different TV's that currently accept 1080p over component allow a maximum rate of 30Hz, vs. 60Hz for 1080p over HDMI. But a constant refresh of 30Hz, if achieved by a game, is still going to look pretty good - after all, it's what TV on HD is broadcast at!
This myth of 1080p not being usable over component cables is I think the biggest factor to not understanding why the $500 PS3 is actually a preferable model over the $600 one. We have all been fed that line to prepare for the need to switch to HDMI, when in fact there was never a need at all other than for the companies to try and protect video content from player to TV at great cost to the consumer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can get scratchproof DVD-Rs already.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=dvd+scratchpr
I bought some under $1 a piece online after I found out that 1 out of every 3 backup DVDs didn't work because of scratches (not because of faulty burning nor age).
Up to now, it works fairly well. Now, they claim it stands up to screwdriver or steelwool, I don't know about that, possibly.
But none of those extensively used backup DVD-Rs are even scratched slightly (40+ of these DVDs). And there are no fingerprints because I can take a paper towel and clean them - good as new! On a normal DVD this would definitely cause scratches.
Now I only wish they covered my DVD movies in this stuff. Why the industry doesn't is beyond my guess. Perhaps they want to force me to buy their movies multiple times (which I won't). Someone gave me Pirates of the Carribean brand new a while back and that just died of a multitude of scratches - don't even know how it got on there:(
But.. vinyl actually IS better than CDs in terms of fidelity. At least for the first few times you play it, that is.
And I'd like a video format that doesn't throw compression artifacts at me at the stated resolution. I'm really getting tired of every low-contrast wall, landscape, or whathaveyou being covered in blocky sharp edges. Which I CAN see, even with a regular television...(and it's even worse on the digital projection screens at the theater. Why does mjpeg handle low-contrasat areas in the same crappy way as mpeg?)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I just found out that my current 3Ghz PC with 6800 GT CANNOT play h264 at 1080i. All of sudden a PS3 with cell processor, RSX board and linux pre-installed is a steal.