JKKDARK
July 2nd, 2007, 23:57
via Wired Blogs (http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/07/sega-price-cuts.html)
Masanao Maeda, corporate director of Sega, told Reuters today that as more and more PlayStation 3 games go multiplatform (when they're not disappearing entirely), aggressive pricing is going to need to be a cornerstone of Sony's strategy.
"Name brand, price and software are what count. Since it's getting difficult to make software availability a differentiating factor, superior marketing and pricing strategy will be the key for Sony."
This is certainly a debatable point. Yes, he's right about the fact that Sony is going to have a hard time making their way simply on the strength of their software catalog. Better pricing would certainly help, although one really must wonder if it's even mathematically possible at this point to have a "superior pricing strategy" when your opponents are Microsoft and Nintendo.
Not to mention the fact that even if they lower PS3's price by $100 at E3, well, uh, the PlayStation 3 was already $500, earlier this year. And it was such a negligible difference, in the grand scheme of things, that it didn't reach enough buyers for them to keep the lower-end SKU around. So we already have pretty solid evidence that a $100 price cut won't do anything.
Perhaps they'll lower to $480 to match the price of the Xbox 360 Elite?
Masanao Maeda, corporate director of Sega, told Reuters today that as more and more PlayStation 3 games go multiplatform (when they're not disappearing entirely), aggressive pricing is going to need to be a cornerstone of Sony's strategy.
"Name brand, price and software are what count. Since it's getting difficult to make software availability a differentiating factor, superior marketing and pricing strategy will be the key for Sony."
This is certainly a debatable point. Yes, he's right about the fact that Sony is going to have a hard time making their way simply on the strength of their software catalog. Better pricing would certainly help, although one really must wonder if it's even mathematically possible at this point to have a "superior pricing strategy" when your opponents are Microsoft and Nintendo.
Not to mention the fact that even if they lower PS3's price by $100 at E3, well, uh, the PlayStation 3 was already $500, earlier this year. And it was such a negligible difference, in the grand scheme of things, that it didn't reach enough buyers for them to keep the lower-end SKU around. So we already have pretty solid evidence that a $100 price cut won't do anything.
Perhaps they'll lower to $480 to match the price of the Xbox 360 Elite?