With the next generation of consoles poised to come out within a year or two, a lot of people were expecting prices on current gen hardware to drop. That hasn’t happened yet, and despite Sony announcing a new PS3 redesign a few days ago, Sony says they have no plans to drop the price of the PS3 any time soon.
In fact, depending on which version of the system you buy, the PS3 is actually about to get slightly more expensive. When questioned about this bizarre move by Engadget, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s VP of Marketing explained Sony’s rationale: “”There’s no price drop formally, but the thing that’s been happening in the market over the last year or so is that there’s been so many retail price promotions, and so many different gift card offers and all those things, being done by all of us (Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony), that we’ve heard from our consumer, ‘Enough with all these weird price moves. What we really want is content and games and value.”
I’m sure we all agree that content and games are great, but a hardware price drop would certainly fall under the category of “value” that Koller is talking about. I don’t know what consumers he’s been asking, but I’ve certainly never met any consumers who would complain about getting cheaper hardware.
Obviously, Sony (as well as the other console manufacturers,) have to keep the costs of their systems up because of a number of issues, including the brutal yen-to-dollar exchange rate, inflation, and production costs, but Koller’s attempt to spin the situation as a benefit to consumers is kind of patronizing and unintentionally hilarious. Here’s a tip to any PR people out there: we’re not dumb (well, some of us aren’t, anyway.) You don’t need to make up elaborate excuses about consumers being tired of price drops. Just tell us the truth and we’ll probably begrudgingly accept it.
