I'm really surprised that no one's already mentioned this, but at the beginning of this week it looked like Sony's Blue Ray disk format was going to be the hands-down victor in the up and coming format wars. Then, a day or two ago both Microsoft and Sony announced support for the competing HD DVD format, and suddenly Sony has real competition in a fight that looked to be a foregone conclusion in their favor. Loss in the format war would be horrifically expensive for Sony. As such, I really don't think it's too great of a stretch to assume that they'll be more willing to take more of a loss on the hardware than they otherwise would have. Cheap PS3's ensure that millions of homes will be equipped with Blue Ray players (PS3's will play Blue Ray movies out of the box), giving Sony an instant customer base for their Blue Ray movies. Couple this with news this week that MS's X-Box division is currently 4 Billion dollars in the hole after its 4 years of existence and is experiencing increasing pressure both internally and from shareholders to turn a profit, and it starts to look reasonably likely that the PS3 and its superior hardware could retail for less than the 360 throughout the consoles' lifecycle. I don't think that a PS3 launch price point of $349 or even $299 are at all out of the question.
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I'm really surprised that no one's already mentioned this, but at the beginning of this week it looked like Sony's Blue Ray disk format was going to be the hands-down victor in the up and coming format wars. Then, a day or two ago both Microsoft and Sony announced support for the competing HD DVD format, and suddenly Sony has real competition in a fight that looked to be a foregone conclusion in their favor. Loss in the format war would be horrifically expensive for Sony. As such, I really don't think it's too great of a stretch to assume that they'll be more willing to take more of a loss on the hardware than they otherwise would have. Cheap PS3's ensure that millions of homes will be equipped with Blue Ray players (PS3's will play Blue Ray movies out of the box), giving Sony an instant customer base for their Blue Ray movies. Couple this with news this week that MS's X-Box division is currently 4 Billion dollars in the hole after its 4 years of existence and is experiencing increasing pressure both internally and from shareholders to turn a profit, and it starts to look reasonably likely that the PS3 and its superior hardware could retail for less than the 360 throughout the consoles' lifecycle. I don't think that a PS3 launch price point of $349 or even $299 are at all out of the question.