Sony's PlayStation 3 has been in the news a lot in the past year. First there were issues with its Blu-ray support and then there were the reports on the console’s delay and finally the fallout from the $499/$599 pricing structure. Well, it appears that that high price of entry is not only turning away potential buyers, but also developers. Sony has received overwhelming support in the past two generations for its PlayStation consoles from 3rd-party developers, but that support may now be in question. From GameDaily BIZ: In the PS3's native Japan, the reaction has been less than pleasant, with more than 90 percent of developers in a recent survey stating that the price of the console is just too high. And indeed it seems that this high price is affecting whether or not certain developers decide to develop for the PS3. Sony's PlayStation business has always been backed by incredibly strong third-party support, but now for the first time that could be in jeopardy. Sony's loss comes to the benefit of its two chief rivals. BusinessWeek reports that developers are taking their business to the Wii and even Xbox 360 (which hasn't been an overwhelming success in Japan in its current or previous form). Gaming giant Electronic Arts has also been showing favoritism to the less expensive Wii when showcasing upcoming games. BusinessWeek goes on to say: EA announced six Nintendo Wii launch titles and showed long working demos for two of those. But it offered only a short clip of a car-racing game for PS3. EA says it's still testing the potential of the PS3. "Many developers think the console's initial high price will lead to slow sales and are holding off on creating games for Sony," Hamamura says. Sony has a lot of work to do this generation to keep its #1 crown. It may have been easy to bowl over the competition with the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, but it looks like the tides are changing. When you have a $200 higher price of entry than your next closest competitor that turns away customers, high licensing costs to offset the cost of development and Blu-ray drive technology that drives up the cost of the console without a 100% guarantee of wide-spread adoption, you know that you’re in for a bumpy ride. DailyTech previously reported that according to IBM, yields on the Cell processors were extremely poor, and that most Cell processors would ship without all eight cores working. According to IBM, some PlayStation 3 units will have 7-core Cell processors and some with 8-core Cell processors. Source: DailyTech
The Playstation 2 was really expensive when it came out also costed around 500 euro here (recalculated, it used to be in guilders back then) Prices dropped not long after it's release though, within 2-3 months already I believe. But it's sad that Sony hasn't learned a lesson from the past and didn't lower the price of their new console. I'll wait and see what happends, the first series are bound to be full of bugs like the PS2 did.
I've been thinking about a Wii for a while now. I've got a PS2 at the moment, and my parents paid £180 for it. When the PS2 came out here, I believe it was about £380 . The Wii looks a bit more fun with the controllers you have to "wave". Sony has tried to make a console too powerful for what people want, and therefore putting the price up.
all they gotta do is lower the price, if i ahd the cash i would buy it, no question about that, i am a sony fan tho, and all the stuff the ps3 can do, its proberbly worth the price, and if everyone tryed the ps3, then everyone proberbly would buy it.
