A newer slim model is being released at $299. Does this change much out there in console land? Anyone considering buying one that doesn’t have one already, or doesn’t have a blu-ray player?
I’m more likely to buy one now, but not particularly enthusiastic. There simply aren’t any killer exclusives for the system, and games that are available on both platforms consistently look and run better on the 360 in spite of the PS3’s superior hardware.
I’m glad they cut the price, but it’s still too much for a game console. I don’t give a damn about blu-ray, so $299 plus tax isn’t worth it for me to play the mere handful of exclusive good games the systems hosts.
If they’d dropped to that price last year, this might have made me consider a PS3, but I already bought my 360, so sorry Sony, too little, too late.
I probably still would’ve picked the 360, though. Most of the games I care about are either multiplatform or 360 exclusive. Screw MGS4, I’d rather have Mass Effect.
I was already planning on getting one in October. Good news for me! Bad news for Sony, who will now be getting $100 less of my money, and 35% less of my shelf space.
So what kind of PS3 is it? Compared to the larger model? Is PS2 compatibility back?
120gb, no backwards compatibility. There seem to be a few new features (turning off with the TV if it’s hooked up via HDMI, working with a Sony TV remote), but nothing groundbreaking. No backwards compatibility either, which no one was expecting.
IMO they’re idiots for causing all the confusion over the PS2 compatability. First it was basically 100% compatible, then partly, now not at all. 
Glad I have a 60GB model with full compatibility.
I had a thread a few weeks back about buying the PS3, and a couple of people mentioned the rumors of this. I’m glad I listened to 'em.
I might, if only because I was thinking I wanted a blu-ray sometime soon.
Meh. There’s really nothing exclusive to the system that I want to play, other than Valkyria Chronicles, and I’ve already got a 360. Changes nothing for me. Maybe in 2-3 more years when things have had time to settle down and we’re another iteration and two more price drops down the line, I’ll give it serious thought.
I was a happy PS2 fan who became an Xbox 360 owner this round. At this point, I can’t see buying myself a PS3 unless they really get some amazing RPG exclusives.
First, I’d like to say a strong “Told you so” to certain people who insisted that Sony’s quick and aggressive denials of a price cut were not a sure sign that one was eminent.
Second, I don’t think it’s too late to save the PS3 for certain values of “save” and this is the move that can do it. They’re probably going to settle into roughly an XBox level position in the market which isn’t great but isn’t out of the game either.
Third, it’s going to have to go down another hundred for me to pick one up since the only title I even have the slightest interest in on the platform is Little Big Planet. Yeah, I know the steps that they have to pass through before they reach the price where I’d start seriously considering it so I’m content to just wait it out and see what happens.
Fourth, given the aggressive pricing from both competitors I’d guess we’ll see a Wii price drop for Christmas as well. Perhaps one bundled with Wii Sports Resort…
You would have an extremely hard time proving that assertion. Correlation is not causation, and all that. If people started asking Sony right now if another price cut is around the corner, they’d do the exact same thing. Why? Because rumors that there’s a price cut around the corner prevent people from buy a unit, plain and simple.
No, they’d ignore it like they did with the rumors when they weren’t planning a price drop.
And when was that?
That’s what I was going to say. Sony has been denying rumors of a price drop on the PS3 practically since the bleeding thing launched and people said $500? That’s expensive!
While I’m entirely too lazy to go back through however many -years- of posts on Joystiq or something similar, Sony has been denying rumors for a LONG time now.
Not a gamer, have a Blu-ray in a laptop that has an HDMI out so I can watch on the big screen. At $299 I would have probably bought this if it had the PS2 compatiblity. My son (no longer lives at home) has lots of games for his now dead PS2. Without that benefit for his visits, I’ll eventually just buy a stand-alone Blu-ray planer.
As a parent buying systems for my children, I always thought the backwards compatibility was a big economic advantage for the Sony line. I still have a Nintendo and Super Nintendo connected to my TV. The lack of an compatibilty (via an adapter or something) always made me slow to buy them the newer system.
Seen Blu-Ray players for $98, now. On the shelf at Wal-Mart.
Slightly more interested, but still not enough to buy one.
Still haven’t bought a Wii or XBox yet either, though, and I was really interested in those.
This generation of consoles is pretty underwhelming, with the benefit of hindsight. The PS3 was too expensive, the Wii didn’t have enough games and the XBox 360 was too unreliable.