PlayStation 3, March 2009 Price Drop Rumor

With so many people wishing Sony would cut the PS3 price to something more reasonable, it’s no big surprise we see constant rumors about potential “price cuts.” This time, a March 2009 rumor “supposedly” came out of the Sony Annual Briefing in London where a butt ton of information was “rumored” to be leaked.

The anonymous source is running around with a bunch of neat rumors, such as a LittleBigPlanet release on the PSP but the one that may hit home most with gamers is price cutting. The PS3 has been around for a few years now and hasn’t budged on the price tag; they’ve had fire sales on obsolete products (smaller disk drives mainly) but no official drops.

Sony won’t comment on speculation, of course, but we’re sure they want to catch Mr. Anonymous from hiding in their meetings and giving away their information… if it is real. D+Pad published the rumor-mongers message saying the “SCEE will be getting more competitive in price from March 2009 onwards.”

Easter would be a fine time for a price cut, if the speculation is real. This upcoming holiday would have made the most sense, to consumers, but Sony apparently has no plans to reduce the price around the time their sales will be increasing anyway. As the PlayStation 3 is doing okay in PAL territories Sony is relying on them, it would seem, to kick up the numbers and show Microsoft they’re not the only second-place game in town.

The Wii continues to dominate and we’re sure a PS3 price drop won’t impact Nintendo’s sales strategy or gamers decisions on one console versus the other as a price drop wouldn’t bring it to a competitive Wii price.

What is your magic number? What price would you buy a PS3 at if you don’t own one already. For us? Drop it a bit and throw in a free LittleBigPlanet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

We Need Another Ikari WarriorsWe Need Another Ikari Warriors

In 1986 SNK released Ikari Warriors, it had all the makings of a classic title. Cool weapons, time strategies, two player action and a great challenge. We’re now seeing folks reproduce some of the essence of classic games by creating platformers like Little Big Planet and Mega Man 9, where is the love for the top-down scrollers?

Ikari Wariors was one of the first game titles to use a rotary joystick along with a directional system. Looking at the current generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it’s plain to see the joystick is equipped with this design. We’ve seen Geometry Wars utilize the analog stick to create a 360 directional attack, so it’s possible to utilize this behavior for Ikari Warriors.

Given SNK is still alive under the name SNK Playmore the intellectual property must still exist to breath fresh life into an Ikari Warrior remake, with about six to eight months development time a classy title could be re-developed using old concepts brought to the current generation hardware.

Blast grenades, RPG’s, smart bombs, air strikes the options are limitless and the concept has been proven to work. Given the gamer demographic of 18-34 it’s plain to see old gamers of the Arcade and NES would recall and rebuild their love for the title while attracting younger audiences whom have never seen an Ikari Warriors title; if it worked in 1986 are we so adverse to it working again?

Games do not have to implement full 3D perspective graphics to be cool, we’ve seen proof in that with the Wii and the demand for titles like Little Big Planet. We neeed another Ikari Warriors.

Blu-ray Doesn’t Validate Your Console, SonyBlu-ray Doesn’t Validate Your Console, Sony

Is Blu-ray dead? Tech Sites around the Net are calling it a “death spiral” and we’re now looking at the downfall of the winning high definition format. Many non-PS3 Blu-ray players are still in the USD $200.00 range, a bit high for mass market adopters, and people aren’t planning to run out and buy a Blu-Ray player in our economic slump.

What’s the market share of the Blu-ray product? Four Percent. Blu-ray and the PlayStation 3 have a lot of battle scares after the fight with HD-DVD to “win” the format war. In the end, Sony won the battle but the war was not with the HD-DVD format, it’s with the average Joe consumer.

Does this effect the PlayStation 3? One of the up sells of the PlayStation 3 was the Blu-ray capabilities, it games and it’s an entertainment device all-in-one. It’s a great deal right?

“The advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.” (zdnet)

The obstacles against the Blu-ray format are huge, especially with NetFlix coming to the Xbox 360, high definition download options and licensing costs on the Blu-ray to movie creators. Blu-ray won’t die in this generation of PlayStation 3 consoles but many folks, including Apple, are pausing to see if it has any chance at all to break into the industry.

Four percent just isn’t enough to inpsire confidence.

Episode 739: Jordan’s BackEpisode 739: Jordan’s Back

No Gravatar

Jordan’s back, as the four of us discuss topics like the fact No Man’s Sky has reached a Very Positive rating on Steam, Russian disinformation is trying to spark a boycott of Stalker 2 by claiming it’s going to draft you into the war in Ukraine somehow, a new Pokémon project in the works with Wallace and Gromit maker Aardman and Sony confirms interest in buying FromSoftware.

In other news:

  • Vision of Mana director quits NetEase to join Square Enix
  • Intel CEO resigns after a disastrous tenure
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 will add cross-play and 12 new subclasses in 2025
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s final expansion originally forced you to blow up Skyhold

Let us know what you think.

The post Episode 739: Jordan’s Back first appeared on Gaming Podcast.