Price cut boosts PS3 sales
Get the low down on video games in this week's GameBuzz.
Mike Fuchs (left), Ashley Hawkes and Louis Bekoe
You don't have to be Nostradamus to have seen this coming: U.S. sales of the PlayStation 3 more than doubled in the weeks after the company recently cut the video game console's price by $100.
"It's the breakthrough we've been anticipating," Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer told The Associated Press. "We've been holding our breath."
Holding our breath?
Note to Sony: Consumers had been giving your PS3 the cold shoulder because of sticker shock, plain and simple.
You began selling them for $500 and $600, which is a wee bit bunch for a video game system.
Yes, I know it comes with some nice features such as a Blu-ray player, wi-fi access and Bluetooth. But people are buying a video game console to, you guessed it, play awesome video games, not to sit around and watch movies or surf the Web.
So it should come as no surprise that your PlayStation 2 is still doing very well, thank you very much, so much so that Best Buy is touting its affordable $150 price tag in its latest ad. No mention of a PlayStation 3 in the circular. Hmmm.
Just look at the Nintendo's Wii. It's done remarkably well, thanks in large part to its $250 price tag, which makes it the cheapest of the big three video game systems including Microsoft's Xbox 360.
It's been a nice trend lately regarding video game system makers lowering their prices (one version of the Xbox 360, which I got for Christmas for $400, now sells for $280). Just in time for the holidays, too.
We discuss this more in this week's GameBuzz show.
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