In a recent meeting in Japan about Sony's Playstation, Sony's president Kutaragi discussed further details on the Playstation 3. Like Sony mentioned before, Kutaragi confirmed that the Playstation 3 will be expensive, but consumers will still be able to afford it if they want it. According to Kutaragi, the main purpose in choosing the expensive Blu-ray technology as well as offering HDTV support is to aim for a 10 year life cycle. This means that consumers will not have to upgrade to a high definition or higher capacity model throughout the Playstation's 3 life cycle.
So far Kutaragi is not going to reveal the actual price for the Playstation 3, however he mentioned that Sony is aiming for a worldwide market and will try their best in keeping the pricing within a certain level.
According to Sony, both Playstation 1 and 2 sales are doing very well. Since July 20th Sony had over 91.6 million PS2 sales and 863 million software sales worldwide. Playstation 1 software game titles still continue to do extremely well with 959 million software sales worldwide. This gives a total of 1.822 billion software sales between the PS1 and PS2. Currently Sony has a game library of over 7,700 PS1 game titles and 5,200 PS2 game titles available.
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Kutaragi started out by reconfirming that the PS3 will be backwards-compatible with PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games and support high-definition TVs. "We're looking at a life cycle of 10 years with the PlayStation 3. We're currently shifting from standard TVs to HD TVs," said Kutaragi. "But in the next couple of years, most flat-panel TVs will be full HD. We're releasing the PS3 with full HD features from the start so that consumers won't have to buy another version of the console in the future. For the same reason, we're using Blu-ray as the PS3's disc format." "I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to," said Kutaragi to a mostly Japanese crowd. "But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best (in containing the price)." Then Kutaragi issued a somewhat ominous warning. "I'm not going to reveal its price today. I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive," he stated. |
Although the Playstation 2 has been out for several years now, it is interesting to see that its games sales are only just starting to catch up with Playstation 1 sales. Then again, it goes to show that not everyone is after the fastest consoles out there, but instead games they enjoy playing. The other advantage is that when consumers buy games for their PS1 or PS2, as long as they buy a matching game, they know it is designed to play in their console and that their console will last for many years, unlike with PCs where I often here about novice PC users confused over why their games will not work properly in their new PC.
While a 10-year life cycle may seem long for the Playstation 3, the Playstation 1 has already been selling for about 10 years and is still going strong. This means that if one forks out for the Playstation 3, it is not like their equipment is going to be obsolete in a few years like with expensive PC graphics cards and CPUs. For example, try getting some modern games that play well on a typical PC from 1995. :p
Source: c|net News - Games
