As soon as possible

Jul 7, 2009 17:01 GMT  ·  By

More and more people are asking Sony to cut the price of the PlayStation 3 in face-to-face talks. And it's not only gamers and analysts who are talking about that but actual game developers and publishers.

Kenji Matsubara, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the newly created Tecmo Koei, told CVG that “Whenever I discuss this with Sony reps I always ask them: 'Please cut the price'. From a publisher's point of view we would welcome a price cut for PS3 and we are waiting, definitely. It's definitely a way of boosting the PS3 market, but it's Sony's strategy and I don't know their cost structure. Sony introduced cutting-edge technology in the PS3, that's why people in the industry accept that the PS3 cost is so high, but we'd welcome a price cut.”

Tecmo Koei is not that big a publisher for Sony to be worried about but it's adding its voice to important companies, like Activision Blizzard. Bobby Kotick, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the biggest publisher in the videogaming industry, recently said that he was analyzing the possibility of his company actually abandoning the PlayStation 3 platform if Sony did not manage to increase the installed base for the device, mainly because sales numbers did not justify the money spent to port games to it.

Speculation related to a price cut for the PS3 began in late 2008, just after Microsoft lowered the price of the Xbox 360. Most people thought that an official announcement could be coming at the E3 trade show but Sony did not say anything at its press conference. Now, the expectation is that the Japanese company will cut at least 50 dollars off the price of its home console in August, as Madden NFL 10 from EA Sports, one of the biggest releases of the year, comes out.