There have been a lot of calls lately, coming from both game developers, like the guys who have created LittleBigPlanet, and from analysts of the videogame market, for Sony to cut the price of the PlayStation 3 home gaming console by about 100 dollars in order to bring it closer to the price of its closest rival, the Microsoft made Xbox 360.
At the Game Developers Conference, Sony is proving that it has partly understood what people have been asking. The console developer has announced that it plans to offer
new development kits for those interested in creating games for the PlayStation 3 that would be cheaper and have more features.
Sony has stated that the move is designed to “further strengthen its support for game development on PlayStation 3. SCEI will deploy various measures to further reinforce game development for PS3 and will continue to expand the platform to offer attractive interactive entertainment experiences only available on PS3.”
The new developer kit models are DECR-1400A for North America, costing 2,000 dollars, 1,700 Euro in the Europe/PAL territories and the DECR-1400J for Japan, priced at 200,000 Yen. Sony Computer Entertainment has also said that the new developer kits allow for increased productivity and announced the 2.40 version of the PhyreEngine, the graphics rendering engine it uses.
It would have been rather weird for Sony to announce a price cut for the
PlayStation 3 at GDC, which is aimed at developers and not gamers directly, especially considering that it has some PS3 bundles on the way. But the public is still expecting to see a lower-priced PlayStation 3 as early as E3 - in June. It's one of the only moves Sony can attempt to make sure that the sales gap between its console and the Xbox 360 does not widen.
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