Honestly, I can see Microsoft and Sony pricing their new systems somewhere between 450 dollars and 500 – more towards the latter. They’ll look for a “soft spot” that appeals to the people and at the same time reduces the losses per unit sold at a minimum. If the hardware specs are those circulating on the net these days, one could even speculate about both Orbis and Durango being sold at manifacturing price in order to reach profitability as soon as possible.

I think selling at a loss isn’t viable anymore in this economy, and this is particularly true for the games console business. If you want your platform to stay healthy for 6 years or more, you need all the money you can get to sustain a long term strategy made of exclusive agreements with third parties, internal development and advertising. Spending the first two years in the market gasping for air is not an option this time around.

You’re wrong about the MGS4 bundle. That was only 50% software emulation and still had a GS chip inside to handle the graphics for the emulator.

The EEGS was a custom chip that was only used in the PS3 so it didn’t benefit from the economies of scale of the PS2 Slim model, so it remained expensive for the entire time it was used in the PS3.

The Bluray drive started out as being slightly more expensive than the EEGS chip but came down in price to where it cost less.

The issue is with the Emotion Engine specifically that makes emulation so difficult.

After software emulation in the MGS4 bundle, any argument of it upping the price of the PS3 were completely null. Because Sony already had the solution to keep prices lower.

But they removed it to push PS3 software. As I said.

The price was only able to be cut to the more reasonable $400 when they removed it in favor of software emulation. As we all know, the software emulation didn’t really work out so well, but what can ya do?

I can tell you this as fact. I also have actually owned both models at their original prices.

The only place Sony used the anti copy technology? For the cross buy promotions with the PS3 and Vita, so you could only get the free Vita game on one account with one Bluray disc.

then wow im getting this Day 1 with or without BC.

Bluray and the cell are why the PS3 was so expensive. They removed b/c to push software sales for PS3.