EU Release of Price Cut 40 GB PS3 Confirmed 173
sinister rouge writes "The BBC has a story confirming a cut price PlayStation 3 with a 40GB hard drive and no backwards compatibility with previous consoles. The console is set to go on sale later this month in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand. No word yet on that particular SKU for the North American market. '[Ray Maguire, head of PlayStation UK,] said: "The people who want to get into new technology early are prepared to pay a premium. We want to get the console to the next level; we have re-engineered the machine to bring the price down. We have invested a lot of money in reaching this price point." Sony is still losing money on each console sold, said Mr Maguire, but would lose less money on the 40GB machine. "We are in an investment phase," he said.'"
No back-compat? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's still over $600 here! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, these prices do include sales tax, but it's still way, waaaay too much for me or anyone I know to consider picking one up, especially as the only PS3 game that really interests me (Gran Turismo) slipped from being a launch title and has now vanished into development hell, with no sign of a firm believable release date.
Re:Still not tempting.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's about the same price as an XBox 360 Elite and in some ways still superior to it, such as having wifi, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, HDMI 1.3, blu-ray etc. The HDD is less, and it might be missing an HDMI cable but otherwise what's to separate them. Of course too network play is free on the PS3 and things like the HDD, headsets etc. use industry standards so those are potential savings too. Lack of BC sucks but then you can always buy the 60Gb model if you want.
I'd say the PS3 is getting pretty close to the 360 price wise and has enough to easily justify it.
Re:Inaccurate title (Score:1, Interesting)
Whether the feature differences are important to the buyer does not change whether or not it's a price cut.
Re:North American Market Apparently Dead? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people don't actually find it that interesting. Most people just want to trash on whatever console they don't have. If you actually align the launches of the consoles from the data of a site like vgchartz then all you see is that the PS3 is selling on par with what the 360 did over the same time span (of course the wii is killing them both) http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii®1=All&cons2=PS3®2=All&cons3=X360®3=All&align=1 [vgchartz.com]. It will be interesting to see what the PS3s christmas upswing looks like compared to the 360s.
As far as games. Well you can look at metacritic and see how many games were rated in green and what year they came out. Unfortunately they don't have a handy flash graph to show it nice and pretty but if you sit down and count the titles from the first year of each launch the 360 had 19 in 2005 and the PS3 had 12 in 2006. Next year we can compare titles from the first full year of each console (the 360 had 48 in 2006, and the PS3 currently has 31 for 2007 and will most likely hit at least 40 by the end of the year, though that's very conservative, i see at least 16 games being released by the end of the year that i would be surprised and disappointed if they were below 70 on metacritic.)
So my point is if you align the launches there's not much difference in performance of the 360 and PS3, but that's not nearly as newsworthy as a zealous mob screaming about the demise of one or the other.
Business not technical decision (Score:3, Interesting)