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Playstation 3 - Going down by GBP 50

Tuesday 18th of August, 2009 - 21:41:54 GMT

The day after Microsoft elected to raise the price of the Xbox 360, Sony went in the other direction by previewing the first PS3 price cut - the first since the console's launch, by a comparatively massive GPB 50 to £249, and USD/EUR 299 in both currencies. Previously the company elected to change hard drive sizes and discriminate by backwards compatibility rather than drop the price. This marketing tactic proved successful in the years before Blu-Ray won the final disc-based film and PC storage format war.

Now that Blu-Ray films are flying off the shelves and the hi-fi players are down to GBP 100, Sony doesn't wish to lose too many film fans that play games - not even to sales of its own players. At the same time, the PS3 refresh, heavily influenced by that of the PS2 slim model, has become as long awaited as a 360 with a reliably cooled chipset. The 34per cent drop in power consumption will do well to reverse the image of environmentally unfriendly consoles compared to the firm's VAIO laptops, which are regularly celebrated by green groups as allowing power computing with fewer dangerous chemicals going into the machine's manufacturing. The slimming of the design will sell itself when placed next to a (presumably Sony) television.

The price cut will let the PS3 easily round off its worldwide sales total to 24 million units, as it currently stands 300,000 consoles short of this total. Given its poor critical image, nearly 53 million PSPs sold is a tribute to the company's tenacity with formats and its small-scale screen design quality.

The slimmer PS3 will arrive to attract the back to school/half-term-to-Christmas market from September.

- Ken

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