If you’ve checked Crunch gear, you may have ran across the little news tidbit of a $100 PS3 price cut. The first thing I thought when I heard of it is - about time. Sony does really need to do something to spark sales of its PS3 hardware, and selling it for $100 bucks less is a decent step in the right direction.

So I read on, while thinking about what games available for the PS3 would I be interested in if I were to buy one. I realized something….

First let me back up a bit….

As you all know, the PS3 launched with 2 tiers. The cheaper of the 2 was the PS3 with a 20 gig hard drive, and a few other missing features but I’m not going to go into that now. The point is that the low end PS3 was $499.99. A hundred bucks more expensive than the higher end Xbox 360.

The higher end PS3 at launch was $599.99, which came with a 60 gig hard drive and a few other features that were left out of the cheaper version. So basically your looking at a game console that is either $100 bucks, or $200 bucks higher than the highest offering from Microsoft (at launch) and is probably one of the biggest reasons why it hasn’t sold as well as Sony would’ve liked.

Since then Sony has scrapped the 20 gig version of the PS3 and the rumors of a 80 GIG version started to surface. Which brings me to what I realized…..

Let me explain the price cut.

Sony has confirmed that there is a 80 gig PS3 that is going to be made available, so there will once again be 2 tiers of the console. The now high end 60 gig PS3 will get a $100 price cut and will cost consumers $499.99. The new 80 GIG PS3 will cost $599.99. So while they have cut the price $100 bucks, they still have a $500 dollar and $600 console…just like they had since launch.

Does it really change anything? Will it help? I don’t know, its still the same price as far as Im concerned…whats 20 more gigs.

One thing that may help is that the new 80 gig version will ship (for a time) with a copy of Motorstorm so that does sweeten the deal a little bit. I still think they need to get the PS3 down to the $399 price range before it will make a difference. Especially since Microsoft still could cut the cost of the Xbox 360 by the holiday and make the PS3 look even more expensive….remember the Wii is beating down both Xbox 360 and the PS3 on a month to month basis in units sold.

Read more about the PS3 price cut at Crunchgear.

Tags: