Activision CEO Warns Sony That the PS3 Needs a Price Cut 149
Bobby Kotick, President and CEO of Activision, one of the largest game companies in the world, has come out with a none-too-subtle warning to Sony that they need to seriously consider a price drop on the Playstation 3. Rumors have been circulating for months that such a drop was forthcoming, but Sony has staunchly denied that they had any plans to drop prices, Kotick said, "The PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don't make it easy for me to support the platform. It's expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. ... They have to cut the price, because if they don't, the attach rates [the number of games each console owner buys] are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony." While it's unlikely that Activision would follow through with such a threat, it definitely adds to the pressure Sony is feeling to lower the PS3's price. Sony issued a brief response which said nothing of consequence.
When planning on lowering prices, best to shut up (Score:5, Informative)
Sony execs aren't dumb. They aren't going to announce price cuts until they happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect [wikipedia.org]
Re:Developing for Cell Processors . . . (Score:1, Informative)
The Cell part of development only compounds the underlying issue with developing for the PS3.
The PS3 uses the GNU toolchain, and whilst Linux zealots will tell you it cured AIDs for them the fact is it's just nowhere near as productive as the Visual Studio toolchain. When you factor in the inherent difficulty of developing with Cell against a relatively unproductive toolchain you see a big difference in overall productivity.
From what I understand Sony are switching their toolchain to something better, but it's not their yet and the difficulty of developing with Cell will still add to the fact it's just not Visual Studio.
If there's one thing Microsoft does well it's software development tools and this is one of the major reasons they're able to hold people on their platforms. Ballmer's 'Developers developers developers' is somewhat humorous but the underlying message is important - if you want your platform to matter, make sure people can develop for it.