PS3 Price Principle

Stan Beer
Thursday, 16 November 2006 06:28

Opinion and Analysis

Those of you who are still worried by the high price tag of the Sony PlayStation 3 should stop your fretting. If you're patient, the PS3 Price Principle will take care of your concerns. What is the PS3 Price Principle?

Well take a look at eBay and reports of the outrageous price gouging concerning the hard to get PS3 perpetrated by unprincipled individuals lucky enough to get their hands on a PS3 early through a pre-order. However, there are obviously plenty of hard core gamers prepared to pay the price just so they can be the first on the block to get their hands on a brand new player.

It doesn't matter if the early models of PS3 are a little buggy as they're bound to be. We've already heard the reports of glitches that prevent playing some PS2 games properly. The early adopters are prepared to wear the glitches just to get the newest model.

Sony of course realizes all of this too well. When the PS2 launched in Australia on November 30, 2000 (not 2001 sorry), it was outrageously priced at AUD$750. In today's dollars, that's roughly equivalent to, or perhaps even more than, the AUD$830 the base model will cost when it goes on sale here next March.

At the time, Sony justified the high PS2 price tag because of the new state-of-the-art technology and of course the DVD player, which were damned expensive in those days. Early adopters still snapped them up.

A few weeks later, when the queues of buyers thinned, Sony slashed the price. This has gone on for the past six years, all while Sony was actually improving the PS2, ironing out the bugs, putting it into a smaller form factor and so on. Today, the PS2 is the most mature games console on the market and two weeks ago was priced at just AUD$188 in Australia.

Anyone who doubts that exactly the same thing is going to happen with PS3, should look to Japan. Sony cut the price of PS3 even before they released it!

In Europe and Australia, without a doubt hard core gamers next March will be queuing up to fork over a large portion of their pay packets to get the newest slightly buggy PS3.

However, in the following weeks, months and years, more budget conscious consumers will gladly pay half and even less of the original price for consoles that have been improved and have more of the latest games available. It's the PS3 Price Principle.