14 DAY TRIAL // The introduction of the new “SuperSlim” PlayStation 3 won’t result in price cuts for existing models, at least according to Sony, as the company claims that consumers want great games and content, not necessarily lower prices.
The PlayStation 3 has been around for quite some time and, at least in the last few years, its price has hovered around the $250/€250 mark.
Now, after confirming that it’s going to debut a redesigned PlayStation 3, Sony has talked about the outgoing generation and how it won’t receive a price cut because, at least according to one of its executives, Jon Koller, consumers don’t want lower prices.
"There's no price drop formally," Koller told Engadget.
"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.'"
The new PlayStation 3 SuperSlim will be available in two different models in North America, one with a 250GB hard drive and one with a 500GB capacity.
In Europe, however, customers will also be able to get a cheaper version of the PS3 with just 12GB of flash storage. This model, according to Koller, won’t arrive in North America because customers in the region consume a lot of digital content and therefore require a big hard drive.
"The smaller Flash drive isn't coming to North America, and a lot of that reason is the digital consumer," said Koller. "We really want to make sure, out of the box, that there is an option for them to be able to download that content. That is really critical for us, very very important."
Despite Sony’s opinion, Microsoft has had a lot of success in North America and all around the world with its cheaper 4GB Xbox 360 model.