PS3 to Sell at Over $800 in UK

joe 155 writes "The Register is reporting that ' the PS3 will cost £425 in the UK - over $800'. SCE UK Managing Director Rat Maguire said: 'I don't think it's an expensive machine - I think actually, it's probably a cheap machine. If you think a Blu-Ray player by itself might be £600-700, and we're coming in at just £425, it's a bargain.' Can a console really be viable at this price?"

Typo of the Century!

From TFA (emphasis mine):

Interviewed by Eurogamer, SCE UK Managing Director Rat Maguire said: "I don't think it's an expensive machine - I think actually, it's probably a cheap machine.

Now the question is: was this merely an innocent mistake, or actually a subtle commentary by Tony Smith, who is probably pissed that he has to shell out £425 for a PS3?

Re:Typo of the Century!

Execpt sitting right next to it will be Nintendo's offering at around £200 (probably nearer £150 or £175). I know which one I'm gonna buy, I had the same choice when I went into the shop and saw the PSP bundle at £270 and the DS bundle at £120. I chose the DS, people will buy the Nintendo, especially as it's going to come out at more than 1\2 the price in the UK, and about 1\3 the price in the US

Re:Typical

Actually, if you look at his other posts, he pretty much spends every gaming thread bitching about people shilling for Nintendo. If anything he is a fanboy, or at least a Nintendo hater. I thought "Gee, another guy complaining about people shilling for Nintendo... oh wait... that name is familiar..."

Yeah, the guy thinks we're being paid, too. Just because I think $600 is crazy. If Nintendo was paying me I could afford a PS3.

Change Your Ads Then!

If you think a Blu-Ray player by itself might be £600-700, and we're coming in at just £425, it's a bargain.'

Buddy, if your logic rests upon the consumer thinking about this being a blu-ray player, then you had better change your marketing strategy.

When I look for a gaming console, I don't care if it plays 8 tracks. I want to be able to play fun games and I would like to do it without too high of a price tag. If you want people to buy it for blu-ray functionality, you better market it as such because the gaming & movie crowds might overlap but one is far larger than the other.

And that's not even bringing up the problems me and my friends experienced with first generation PS2s and their ability (or lack thereof) to play DVDs. I haven't played a DVD in a PS2 for years ... now I've learned my lesson and don't care what a console can do aside from gaming.

Do one thing right and don't bloat your hardware please. You haven't had a spotless track record for testing prior to release and more functionality means a lot more testing.

Do you want me to see this as "The Playstation Three" or "The Sony Blu-Ray Player"? Pick one and make a solid product.

Re:Change Your Ads Then!

1) The PS2 didn't cost 400 freaking quid
2) DVD was an emerging standard with a huge and noticeable advantage over the popular storage medium of the time (VHS), while BR is not
3) Sony will lose money hand over fist if people just buy it as a player without games. However, this doesn't happen, because people do buy consoles for games. The entire business model is driven by this fact.
4) Did I mention it cost 400 freaking pounds?!

Re:Change Your Ads Then!

The problem is that when the PS2 came out, there was still a significant portion of the population that didn't own a DVD player, so it was a real bargain (especially when decent standalone DVD players at the time were close to $200).

Now, everyone already has a DVD player, and a standalone player can be had for $50. Sure, Bluray is a new technology, but to most people it's just a fancy DVD, and they already have a DVD player. When the PS2 came out, DVD technology had been out for years, and it was in the middle of the transition from "early adopter" product to "mass market" product. Bluray hasn't even really come out yet, and is still in the very early stages of the "early adopter" market.

Basically, while Microsoft and Nintendo are offering game consoles that immediately appeal to the mass market, Sony is putting in a very expensive cutting-edge technology that pretty much guarantees their primary market will be the affluent early adopters. While this is certainly a viable market, it's a much much smaller one. While this may not matter in commodity electronics, in the gaming industry, where the number of units you can sell has a major effect on how many developers make games for your platform, shooting for such a small market can kill a console before it ever gets off the ground.

Re:Change Your Ads Then!

A few points:

• The PS2 came out at £299, not £425 (or, as I like to call it, almost 50% more).
• DVDs had been out for several years, and not only were an established format, had a sizable catalogue available (1,000+ titles, I believe). Blu-Ray will have been out for a few months, with a catalogue best measured in dozens.
• DVDs showed a clear advantage over the previous format, on almost any TV. Blu-Ray shows a noticable advantage (and even less noticable if you've ever tried an upscaling DVD player) on HDTVs... which are still in the minority even in the US, and very much in the minority in the UK.

Re:Change Your Ads Then!

They can't.

I don't think Sony is capable of NOT trying to control a format. The PS3 is simply thier attempt to get an installed base of Blu-Ray players, fast, and beat out HD-DVD. The rest of the company is simply using the PS division to futher thier own ends.

WHY they need to control a format is up for grabs -- it's possible it's just thier culture, or the dogma handed down by the leaders that has been followed for decades. But this is the exact same thing as Beta, MD, Memory Sticks, and UMD -- all of which failed to get any support outside of Sony products.

The PS3 is expensive, but it's the only player in it's domain in Japan -- the Xbox 360 has, somehow, been less successful than the original Xbox over there.

There's also an interesting column about E3's fallout in Japan [next-gen.biz] that makes the next-gen battle much different over there. It's interesting to note that if the PS3 will be bringing demo/content delivery services to Japan, it would be a revolutionary first, given that Japan's gaming landscape is much different than North America's (difference: Nintendo managed to get game rentals outlawed there back in the day. So game magazines have much more clout, which a demo download service could disrupt.)

Re:Change Your Ads Then!

It's also amazing that Sony still hasn't learned it's lesson. But there's a reason for that. This is a case of left hand vs right hand. The hardware engineers make various stuff, but continually have their hands tied behind their backs by the "content" people, or someone else at Sony with another agenda. Each time it is the hardware division that pays the price for everyone meddling in their affairs.

Sony is a company with a good hardware division that implement rather innovative products. I'm sure when they drew the PS3 up they said a Bluray player was fine but as it came to crunch time they wanted to dump it. Yet I'm willing to bet it's the 'content' people who wanted to force BluRay down everyones throat and forced them to put it in and jack the price up WAY too high. The content people are DEMANDING their DRM, and again this is going to fuck over the hardware division of Sony.

At this point the best thing this company could do is split. Cut out the cancer that is Sony records/film and let the hardware people make products that WORK without being crippled. Personally I feel this works to my benefit because with BluRay fighting HD-DVD it's likely that neither will win and DVD will stay; which is exactly the result I want. Go Sony!

Re:VAT

IS this before or after the VAT TAX

Don't you just hate redundancy in TLA Acronyms?

Prices of other consoles in the UK

So does anyone know how much the Wii and the 360 will cost there? If everything there just costs more then saying $800 is meaningless.

Re:Prices of other consoles in the UK

The premium Xbox 360 is £280 (~$530), the crap pack is £210 (~$400), the basic (not value / giga pack) PSP is £150 (~$280) and the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 1 both launched at £300 (~$570), although the latter dropped in price very quickly, and Microsoft ended up giving away some controllers and games to early adopters in compensation. All prices rounded up, and include 17.5% VAT.

The Pound Sterling price is slightly (about £10-20) more than the Euro one, those British plugs must cost a bomb.

This just in..

Extremely Rich Man doesn't think £425 is a lot of money.

In other news, a homeless man retracted his suicide plans upon finding a tenner in the gutter.

Nothing to see here

This is normal practice in the UK. Our prices are always higher than overseas, it`s nothing new.

They don`t call us "Treasure Island" for nothing. After all, what are you going to do? Buy an import PS3 and UK games won`t work, plus import tax will kill any saving. Go to Europe to avoid region coding and taxes? How many people actually will?

Re:Not that expensive

And how successful were those consoles?

Re:Not that expensive

PS3 has one major difference to Neo Geo and 3DO: it's only on par with the competition, not leaps and bounds ahead as the various marketing types would have us believe.

When Neo-Geo came out, we were still playing with 8-bit consoles. Neo-Geo was meant to basically be an arcade-level piece of equipment, and marketed to the class of people who could afford to stick a real Street-Fighter cabinet in their rumpus rooms, but who wanted to swap out games as easily as with a console. NG was even basically the same level of hardware as their arcade machine, which nobody believed could happen back then. And 3DO was a whole different animal, attempting some weirdass hybrid level of interactive video machine during the height of the FMV craze, before everyone had a PC with a CD-ROM.

Sony, however, doesn't have much to push. Hardcore techies can go on about poly counts and HD, but your average Joe will be able to look at the same demo played on PS3, 360, or Wii and not see any noticeable level of graphical difference. This isn't an 80s arcade-vs-console battle, or even a SNES-vs-Genesis-vs-NES deal where anyone could see the extra detail and capability. The only noticeable difference to anyone without fanboyish loyalty to one brand over another or a particular exclusive killer app to look forward to, is the honking big price tag on one of them.

Why would I have a problem?

"Besides, how many of you can pull yourselves from your computers long enough to play on a console?"

*raises hand*

If I'm going to play a game anyway, why would I care that much if I sit on this chair in front of the computer or on that sofa in front of the TV? No, seriously. I'm there for the game, regardless of whether it's a computer, console, or a magic Ouija board with a LCD screen.

Seems to me that some people get so focused on the means, that they lose sight of the goal. The computer is not the goal, and the console isn't the goal either. They're just _means_. Playing a good game is the goal.

That's it. That's what being a "gamer" is all about: games. Nothing else. Everything else is in some other category. And let me recap it, for those who still don't get it:

- E.g., those just wanting to brag about how many more 3DMark points their new 7900 GTX scores than my PS2, those aren't really looking for the "gamer" category. I don't play 3DMark, I play games. For that kinda discussion, that's over there, through the door labelled "willy wavers".

- E.g., contrary to popular belief, stupid fanboy wars about Nintendo vs Sony vs Microsoft aren't "gamer" stuff either. The brand name isn't a goal, and anyone who has serving Nintendo or Sony or MS as a goal really needs to take a break and a critical look at their life. Again, playing a good game is the goal. Owning a Nintendo or a Sony or a MS console or a PC is merely a means to playing the game you want to play, nothing more.

- E.g., no, as a gamer I don't give a flying fuck about the controller being with/without vibration, banana shaped, nunchaku shaped, mouse+keyboard, or whatever, either. That's just means too. Will there be a great game that requires that controller? In some cases, I seriously doubt it, but the final judgment will be actually seeing that game on the shelves, or not. Then I'll go and buy the right controller for it too. (I had no problems buying lightguns for lightgun games, or a Dreamcast keyboard for chatting in PSO, after all. But again, those were the means, not the end. The purpose was the game, not the lightgun.)

Will I buy a PS3 or a Wii or an XBox 360? Hell if I know. Maybe all three, maybe neither, maybe something in between. Depends on whether any of them will have enough games I really want to play. If they have the games, sure, sign me up. If not, not. It's all about the games, in the end, everything else is just means.

And again, if a game I want to play is only on a console, I'll have no problem getting up from the computer and moving over to the console. Why wouldn't I? Doubly so if the whole genre doesn't even exist on the PC. (When was the last time there was a fighting game for the PC, for example?)

From the Article

"Outraged chavs complained that it would take saving two or three welfare payments to afford the PS3, and that being unfamiliar with how banks worked they were being unfairly discriminated against."

Expect the Playstation to underperform.

It's not going to stay that price. All the consoles have come down in price relatively quickly. So the question is not whether it is viable but more whether it's a sensible decision.

The way consoles are sold is quite a clever exercise in capturing the consumer surplus; that is, segmenting your market according to their willingness to pay. You launch at a price that is very high to start with and you capture the relatively small segment of the market that thinks your product is really worth that much. You then slowly lower your price so you hoover up more and more of the people who are willing to part with their cash when the price is more reasonable. Eventually, as you near the end of production, you cut your prices further to get it off the shelves and get the people who want something for nothing.

The problem Sony has neglected to contemplate is that this Playstation is not launching in the same conditions as the previous versions of the brand. It is not the first to market with the new generation of console. This is crucial, because now Microsoft is already ahead of the curve with the price strategy I described above. At every stage in the price lowering, we'd expect Microsoft to be cheaper than the Playstation. The Xbox 360 is likely to have more games at any given instant than the Playstation 3.

Another factor here is BluRay. I'd estimate that 80% of Playstation 2s are hooked up to a small TV in some teenageers bedroom. They're not going to go out and buy a High-Definition set for their Playstation 3. They will get no benefit from the enhanced resolution of BluRay and therefore see no reason to buy it.

For this reason, I expect the Playstation to under perform by a long way. It may even cause the Playstation to fade much in the same way the Dreamcast caused Sega to wash out to see. These are interesting times to be alive.

Simon.

Re:Expect the Playstation to underperform.

"These are interesting times to be alive."

Indeed! If it weren't for the console wars, life would just be so uninteresting that I would just rather DIE!

Not if I don't want a Blu-Ray player

It's only a bargain if I want a Blu-Ray player.

If I what I'm really looking for is a game console, the added cost for the Blu-Ray player sounds more like several hundred dollars down the toilet.

In other news...

...Jack in the Box has announced that its new burger, the "Jumbo Jack 2" will be priced at $250 and contain a generous portion of "the finest Russian caviar."

Jack in the Box CEO Jack said, "I don't think it's an expensive burger. I think it's actually a cheap burger. If you think that that much caviar itself might be $300-$400, and we're coming in at only $250, it's a bargain."

But...I just wanted a burger.

The UK != The US

I have a couple of points to make about how they are marketing it as a cheap way to get a blu-ray player. This worked brilliantly for the PS2 in the UK. In the same way we all told our parents we needed a PC for "homework" when growing up. This won't work for a number of reasons.

1) DVD -> Blu-Ray != VHS -> DVD. VHS were terrible. Crappy quality and wore out fast. DVD players let us use our current equipment to get much better picture quality. It was a one purchase upgrade. And it's only become universal in the last few years (now that a dvd player is £30). With Blue-ray moveis I need a new TV or it's meaningless. And a new TV will never reach £30. most people won't upgrade till our current TV breaks.

2) PAL != NTSC. When I've been in america I have to say - the picture quality is terrible. I can see the desire for HD television there. But in the UK we have very good quality broadcasts. There is less desire for the upgrade.

3) Freeview. This - in my opinion - is the clincher. Our normal terrestial broadcast (channels 1-5) is the primary method of recieving TV. This will be shut off between 2008 and 2010 to replaced with the currently available "freeview" this provides 30-40 free channels for the price of a set top box. There is much annoyance about this - even when set top boxes are only about £30. "Freeview" doesn't have the bandwidth to provide HD content. So knowing that cable channels in the UK have always been niche, there is no way that people will be willing to upgrade from freeview till at least 2010.

To me, this suggest that these consoles are a generation early with HD in the UK. And this should have profound effects. In my opinion of course.

What you technically get for the $ doesn't matter

I think you have to look at the psychology behind console sales. The buyer wants a fun gaming experience, and the ability to pay for the whole thing piecemeal.

Why didn't you see PS2's bundled with a 5 or 10 pack of games, or even including a memory card and 2 controllers, right in the original box? Simple! Because the typical consumer feels much more comfortable shelling out, say, $600 as $200 here, another $50 here, and maybe $90 there, etc. until reaching that $600 total, rather than bam - $600 up-front.

I barely know *anyone* who uses a PS2 who didn't buy that 2nd. controller and a memory card, and owns at least 5 or 6 game titles! Yet almost none of them would have paid for all of that in one box, even if it was discounted a little bit as a bundle!

This is going to be the PS3's problem too. Even if consumers *do* wind up wanting blue-ray players shortly after the thing is released, and feel it's a good value for all the cool games it plays, plus the blue-ray capability - they won't want to swallow the whole cost up-front. It'll just feel like too much of an investment in something that's far from a necessity.

If Sony wants successful adoption of these units, and this really is close to the cost to build 'em, they're going to have to take a big loss up-front on the sales, and find a way to nickle and dime the buyers on all the "must have" extras and games so they can make it all back in the long-haul.

But.... VHS sucked

That's why DVD inclusion in the PS2 wasn't a dumb idea.

DVD's were a massive leap over the pathetic quality (and "sequential access") of VHS.

By contrast, DVD's don't suck. So Sony, if your potential market is people who have HD Televisions AND want to be early adopters of unproven media AND don't mind waiting for a meaningful list of available titles to become available AND don't mind shelling out goofy amounts of cash per title... then congratulations on your "niche".

For a second there we thought you guys were trying to make a mass market product.