PS3 pricing survey.

[Stupid Fat Hobbit]

As reported by Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=69968), a survey shows that many US consumers are somewhat uninformed on the price they can expect to pay for a PS3.

The report, which surveyed active current gen console gamers during the month of October, found that 48 per cent of those thinking about buying a PS3 thought it would cost under US $300.

[Busted_Astromech]

...and the E3 surprise begins again. Have fun dealing, oh mainstream consumer.

[Paranoia]

PS3 won't even be $500, not with all that forced bundles crap.

[Chaos Machine]

48% of those people surveyed are retards.

[Abednigo]

Some parents are going to be shocked when they go on Ebay to find little Johnny a PS3 for Christmas.

[Gorvi]

76% of surveys are inaccurate 89.4% of the time.

[agentgray]

I predict there will be 400,000 people willing to pay for a $600 item.

...and then there will be a third if that number willing to pay $1000+ on eBay for it.

[Serapth]

Wow, a poll that shows that a good chunk of Americans are uninformed!

Colour me shocked! :D

[Serapth]

I predict there will be 400,000 people willing to pay for a $600 item.

...and then there will be a third if that number willing to pay $1000+ on eBay for it.

Another thing to keep in mind, thats 400K units for the USA, Canada and Mexico. Probrably means about 300K units in the states.

[Stupid Fat Hobbit]

48% of those people surveyed are retards.

Well, half of all people are below average inelligence. (Yes yes, stats guys, I know. Don't be mean)

Serioualy, though, that's a little harsh. I think we get a bit out of touch hanging around places like Evil Avatar, where most people tend to be up to date with gaming news. There are a lot of casual gamers out there who'll never go near a site like this, and a lot of them will buy a PS3 on the brand alone.

Of course, anyone who doesn't know how much the PS3 is going to cost probably hasn't preordered, so they're unlikely to have the chance to get one until sometime next year anyway...

[phantomhitman]

I disagree, 34% of the surveyors had only a ged. This tilts the surveys 58% the other way.

[Serapth]

Actually, the most shocking part of this report is:

- but the figure is lower for Nintendo's new console, with just 39 per cent of GameCube owners considering a Wii purchase. Almost the same number - 40 per cent - of those who bought a GameCube may buy a PS3 this time around.


I figured more then half of Nintendos install base system were people from the Nintendo 64. I always figured it was the same people ( and children ), but the same franchises over and over. Look in the Zelda thread to see what I mean.

[Stupid Fat Hobbit]

Actually, the most shocking part of this report is:

Yeah, that part surprised me as well. It's very much at odds with my personal experience. Everyone I know who has or had a Gamecube wants a Wii.

[Heretic Machine]

Actually, the most shocking part of this report is:


I figured more then half of Nintendos install base system were people from the Nintendo 64. I always figured it was the same people ( and children ), but the same franchises over and over. Look in the Zelda thread to see what I mean.

Let me ask you something: Can you name one solid GC exclusive that showed up in 2006? I know I can't. Nintendo abandoned the platform a year before having their new console out. I hear people bitch all the time about the short life-span of the original XBOX, but this was ten times worse.

[NightRain]

Really it is worse for US people.

PS2 was $449 Canadian on Launch day, I bought one. The Xbox was $449 too. Both were $299 US. Yes just 6 years ago the US dollar was worth about 1.50 Canadian.

It was so high becuase of the weak Canadian Dollar and the strong US dollar.
Sine then things have changed. The US dollar is very low and weak and the Canadian dollar is stronger.

Now with the US dollar being worth about $1.15 Canadian things are much better here. $659 for 60GB PS3 compared to $599 US. For us Canadians who bought SP2 at launch we can get a PS3 for ONLY $210 (50% more) more but US customer pay double what they paid for a PS2 at launch. Japanese launch price of PS2 and PS3 isn't that big of a difference either, similar to Canada. US is getting screwed really, but that is mostly due to their weak dollar.

Price is still too high considering the poor selection of games avalible.

[Kelegacy]

I think pricing is going to be just one of many reasons that the PS3 doesn't live up to its predecessors.

Or the 360...

[roboninja]

Well, puts a dent in those numbers about how many PS2 owners want to buy a PS3; those people did not even know how pricey it was, so their opinions on buying it are very likely to change.

[Mr.Green]

48% of those people surveyed are retards.
Or people that don't live on the internet.

[soco]

can't say i'm surprised. i know quite a few people who aren't hardcore gamers who were talking about th PS3 that had no idea how much it was going to cost. these people, in my experience, are the type of people that likely wouldn't have bought at launch anyway, and are content with their PS2.

[Serapth]

I think pricing is going to be just one of many reasons that the PS3 doesn't live up to its predecessors.

Or the 360...

To make matters worse, Sony is going to have a harder time getting costs under control for future price cuts. MS used mostly off the shelf parts that have been around for years ( PowerPC + DVD9 ), while Sony is going with brand new tech ( Cell + BluRay ). MS will be able to get costs down alot faster ( rumour has it, they are at break even on hardware now ). This means, Sony wont be able to get into a price war and win.

[Gorvi]

More proof to show that your average American does little to no research to look into a product they plan on purchasing. Anyone surprised?

[Reanimated]

I've been observing this for a long time. Just about every time I'm in Gamestop some schmo walks in and asks about the PS3. Then when they're told the price, they make any one of a myriad of shocked comments and then say something to the effect of "fuck that".

I love seeing the look of sticker shock on their faces.

[MaiXu]

I get a good laugh from all those people expecting to pay LESS than $300. We'll see how long that good 'ol brand loyalty lasts.

[Roc Ingersol]

I'm not really surprised that uninformed people think the thing will cost around $300.
We all wtf'd when we heard 500/600 too.

Just because they hadn't heard the price yet doesn't make those 48% stupid.

[JazGalaxy]

I'm not really surprised that uninformed people think the thing will cost around $300.
We all wtf'd when we heard 500/600 too.

Just because they hadn't heard the price yet doesn't make those 48% stupid.

I wasn't shocked. The guy told you you need a second job for the system. Anyone who was shocked after that is just an idiot or wasn't paying attention.

[Roc Ingersol]

Are you missing the point here? I think you are.
Point is, the first time you learned that the thing was going to be significantly more expensive, you wtf'd.

It doesn't matter when you heard it.
Without any of the pre-release info, there's no reason to expect anything over 300.
It makes perfect sense that people without information don't assume the PS3 is going to cost twice what the PS2 cost.

[Telefrog]

I don't understand why everyone keeps saying the PS3 is too expensive. It seems well within reason. Now if you'll excuse me, my gold-plated hovercraft is due for it's daily caviar bath.

[Evil Avnovice]

Of the core audience that Sony's marketing the PS3 towards, the "uninformed" must be one of them.

I wonder how these people expected the system to cost less than $300 without doing some homework.

[Don Chichon]

First post here after many months of just reading, so hi everyone ;)

Regarding the price people expected to pay, I'm not so surprised that most of them are not aware of how high it really is. What's been most visible to a majority of people is "TrueHD, BluRay, first true next-gen console, blablabla". And then the usual asterisk, please report to the notes section of this ad, and the retail price in size 1 font at the bottom of the page. But who reads that anyway? Not your average joe...
Plus they see that the XBox 360 is available for 300 bucks, so they probably expect Sony to align the price of their console with their competitor's current offering. Obviously that's not the case.

I also wanna share a little story about a talk I had about Sony with one of my "older" collegues today. When it came to the PS3, the only thing he had heard on the news recently was "Yeah it's released in Japan, and I hear it's selling for 2 or 3 times the retail price, so that must mean it's one hell of a console". And that's what most people are gonna hear on the news, and think "Hey if it sells for that much, it must be good!". Did the general media make that much of a fuss when the XBox 360 came out? I don't think so.

Anyway, I'm not trying to make a point or anything, just a few random thoughts/my opinion of things I wanted to share.

Long live EvAv :)

[Chaos Machine]

I've seen full media coverage regarding the price...In fact I am pretty sure I've seen an article about the ps3 regarding its price on nearly every news site in the US. From Google news, to yahoo, to the fucking wall street journal...hell even bloomberg and the chicago tribune had news on it. I blame ignorance rather than misinformation cause I cant browse a website or read a newspaper right now without reading something about the ps3*.....


except porn sites!

[Spigot]

I'll agree with this survey. A quick chat on the weekend with some uninformed family members had them with their jaws on the floor when I explained how the system is going for about $600+ Canadian plus all of the costs of games, cables, etc.

Of course, they hadn't even heard of the Wii, so that shows their level of knowledge of the industry, but still...

I think they honestly thought that the PS3 would be about $300 or so.

[TrackZero]

Another thing to keep in mind, thats 400K units for the USA, Canada and Mexico. Probrably means about 300K units in the states.

I know 40k of the 400k is going to Canada.

[TrackZero]

Let me ask you something: Can you name one solid GC exclusive that showed up in 2006? I know I can't. Nintendo abandoned the platform a year before having their new console out. I hear people bitch all the time about the short life-span of the original XBOX, but this was ten times worse.

Agreed. I think the last game I ended up buying was Paper Mario 2. It's been a dead system for me since.

[Serapth]

Of course, they hadn't even heard of the Wii, so that shows their level of knowledge of the industry, but still...


In my very limited experience, I have found this to be true at the retail level aswell. I went in to buy GoW a few days ago, and the clerk asks me if im going to try and pick up a PS3. I said, nah... to rich for my blood, im more interested in the Wii, how many are you getting in?

The what? He responds, which is doubly sad as this walmart has basically plastered Wii advertising all over the GC area.

The new Nintendo, how many are you getting on Sunday?

Huh?

Finally a slighly smarter clerk comes over and actually knows the answer.

6 PS3's , 18 Wii's. Pretty impressive for a town with only 12,000 people in it.

[TheFlyingOrc]

In my very limited experience, I have found this to be true at the retail level aswell. I went in to buy GoW a few days ago, and the clerk asks me if im going to try and pick up a PS3. I said, nah... to rich for my blood, im more interested in the Wii, how many are you getting in?

The what? He responds, which is doubly sad as this walmart has basically plastered Wii advertising all over the GC area.

The new Nintendo, how many are you getting on Sunday?

Huh?

Finally a slighly smarter clerk comes over and actually knows the answer.

6 PS3's , 18 Wii's. Pretty impressive for a town with only 12,000 people in it.

Heh. Welcome to EB. Nintendo has to work their tail off this generation to get over that kinda stuff.
Edit: Didn't see that you said Walmart. However, this did happen to me at an EB during the summer. I was amazed.

[Spigot]

That is impressive. Our local EB is only getting one PS3 in and maybe about 10 Wii's.

That's pretty sad about the employee. Our Walmart has the same giant WII display.

As for a decent 2006 GC exclusive, I'd have to say that my pick would be Chibi-Robo. I absolutely loved that game from start to finish. It wasn't perfect, but the flaws were more than outweighed by the sheer amount of fun I had with it.

Sadly, it came out in early 2006 and there hasn't really been anything of note since then. Sigh.

[Metalhaze]

I think a better way to run the survey should have been to give the consumers that they are asking a spec. sheet and ask them to read it over quickly and based on what they see on the sheet, take a guess as to what the PS3 is worth.

Just asking schmucks off the street who don't know shit about the PS3 and then presenting the information in a biased fashion is not what I call a legitimate survey.

Obviously people are going to think its going to cost a certain amount of money if they have no prior knowledge of the system and nothing to base their judgment on besides past and current consoles that have already been on the market for a while.

If you had asked me what I thought the PS3 would cost back before E3 and back before I knew about everything it was going to come with, I probably would have said that it was going to cost the same as the Xbox or a little more

Now that I know what it comes with, I can see the justification in the price.

Do realize that you are saving money with this machine. You may not know it, but buying everything this machine has to offer SEPARATELY would run you a much higher price tag than just 600 bucks.

[Slack3r78]

MS used mostly off the shelf parts that have been around for years ( PowerPC + DVD9 ), while Sony is going with brand new tech ( Cell + BluRay ).
Er, you're not quite accurate on this point. Both the Cell and Xenon use a PPC instruction set. Neither are conventional off the shelf PPC parts.

They're actually both based off of similar design philosophies of brute forcing power through parallel in-order execution, but the Xenon is the more conservative of the two.

[Neosho]

Now that I know what it comes with, I can see the justification in the price.

Do realize that you are saving money with this machine. You may not know it, but buying everything this machine has to offer SEPARATELY would run you a much higher price tag than just 600 bucks.

See, the issue is we're not saving money because most of us don't want the blu-ray player in the PS3. Given the less than steller quality that's been produced by them so far, the high costs, etc, etc...it's sony forcing their format on gamers, and using that as a reason for upping the cost. What else is there in the machine that is worth the cost? If you want a cheapie blu-ray player, sure, it's great...but if you want to just play videogames, it's fucking balls that they upped the price 200$ just so that they could get their format out oon the market.

[Stupid Fat Hobbit]

I think a better way to run the survey should have been to give the consumers that they are asking a spec. sheet and ask them to read it over quickly and based on what they see on the sheet, take a guess as to what the PS3 is worth.

Just asking schmucks off the street who don't know shit about the PS3 and then presenting the information in a biased fashion is not what I call a legitimate survey.

That would be the most pointless survey ever concieved. If they haven't heard of the PS3, I'm sure they'd have a really good idea of the cost of hard drives and video RAM, and the benefits of a multi-core processor. :rolleyes:

[Talanvor]

Sadly yeah, I know several people who own a PS2 and are wondering how much a PS3 is going to be. Whenever I tell them the sheer disbelief followed shortly by something like "Holy Shit!" always makes me giggle.

[Spigot]

I heard a blurb on the news this morning about reports that the PS3 WILL NOT be able to play a lot of older games. I thought they had the backwards compatibility locked up pretty tight. Anyone know anything about this latest development or is it just news readers on mainstream stations getting things screwed up?

[Serapth]

Er, you're not quite accurate on this point. Both the Cell and Xenon use a PPC instruction set. Neither are conventional off the shelf PPC parts.

They're actually both based off of similar design philosophies of brute forcing power through parallel in-order execution, but the Xenon is the more conservative of the two.

To my understanding, the powerpc that became Xenon, was an existing product at IBM for a number of years, used in their server products. The cell on the other hand is based on the powerpc, but a new design.

[Gorvi]

I heard a blurb on the news this morning about reports that the PS3 WILL NOT be able to play a lot of older games. I thought they had the backwards compatibility locked up pretty tight. Anyone know anything about this latest development or is it just news readers on mainstream stations getting things screwed up?

It was probably refrencing the story that's been floating around the past few days about the 200 PSOne and PS2 games that have 'issues' running on the PS3 currently. Now, never mind that the 200 number includes mutliple versions (rereleases, special editions, etc...) of the same game or that the problems with some are relatively minor (no background music in cutscenes in Radiata Stories), many posts have had fun exagerating the story. Also, considering that there's 'problems' with 200 games out of approxamatly 8,000 games, and it seems a bit more minor. But, like I said, some people like to read things the way they want.

[Morangie]

Now that I know what it comes with, I can see the justification in the price.

Do realize that you are saving money with this machine. You may not know it, but buying everything this machine has to offer SEPARATELY would run you a much higher price tag than just 600 bucks.
Come on, you're not even trying. This isn't gamefaqs, you need to EARN your filthy shill money here.

[Morangie]

Now, never mind that the 200 number includes mutliple versions (rereleases, special editions, etc...)
No, it doesn't (http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/745/745506p1.html).

This figure counts multiple versions of the same game (budget versions, limited editions, etc.) as a single entity

[Slack3r78]

To my understanding, the powerpc that became Xenon, was an existing product at IBM for a number of years, used in their server products. The cell on the other hand is based on the powerpc, but a new design.
They're both pretty radical departures from traditional PPC CPU design.

IBM's server products from the POWER line are out-of-order processors whereas Cell and Xenon are both in-order processors that rely on pushing as much data as possible through as quickly as possible. The idea being that by dropping a lot of the hardware required for out-of-order execution, you can produce a much smaller die (and therefore cheaper processor) but with a little bit of clever design, come up with a processor that's very fast at certain tasks.

The Cell and Xenon have much more in common with each other than they do with other more recent IBM CPUs like the PPC970.

I'd highly recommend (yet again) Hannibal's article on the Xenon (http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/1) and Cell (http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars) over at Ars Technica.

[Gorvi]

No, it doesn't (http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/745/745506p1.html).

Your link and quote actually prove my point. Each version of the game is counted as a single entity, meaning seperately.

[bapenguin]

Your link and quote actually prove my point. Each version of the game is counted as a single entity, meaning separately.

You have it backwards man.

This figure counts multiple versions of the same game (budget versions, limited editions, etc.) as a single entity

Multiple versions as a single entity. The stuff is only counted once.

[tombofsoldier]

Lol lol lol, mainstream USA (read: your average dumbarse) is going to be in for a slight shock come this following week. I bet MS is already rubbing their hands in anticipation.

"Gee, well that their PS3 is too expensive. good things its sold out. My kid done told me that Nintendo is fer babies. Guess I'll be gettin this here 360 thing."

[Goronmon]

"Gee, well that their PS3 is too expensive. good things its sold out. My kid done told me that Nintendo is fer babies. Guess I'll be gettin this here 360 thing."To continue with the stereotypes, I don't think too many people who talk (or type) like that will be able to afford either the 360 or PS3.

[Talanvor]

Afford, no. Able to get one on credit? Yeah I think so. Hell at Target they have a PS3 flyer to intice people to buy, and on the back it urges to apply for their store credit card for the discount. It's funny, but not ha ha funny.

[TheFlyingOrc]

I think a better way to run the survey should have been to give the consumers that they are asking a spec. sheet and ask them to read it over quickly and based on what they see on the sheet, take a guess as to what the PS3 is worth.

Just asking schmucks off the street who don't know shit about the PS3 and then presenting the information in a biased fashion is not what I call a legitimate survey.

Obviously people are going to think its going to cost a certain amount of money if they have no prior knowledge of the system and nothing to base their judgment on besides past and current consoles that have already been on the market for a while.

If you had asked me what I thought the PS3 would cost back before E3 and back before I knew about everything it was going to come with, I probably would have said that it was going to cost the same as the Xbox or a little more

Now that I know what it comes with, I can see the justification in the price.

Do realize that you are saving money with this machine. You may not know it, but buying everything this machine has to offer SEPARATELY would run you a much higher price tag than just 600 bucks.

Oh goodness - it's the retard rodeo argument again.

A consumer should see 2 things:
1. What the product costs
2. What the product is worth to them

If you make decisions based on any 2 criteria other than that, you are not being a rational consumer. If 1 is less or equal to 2, you buy it. If it's greater, you don't. It's ultra basic economics.

[Spigot]

You have it backwards man.

Multiple versions as a single entity. The stuff is only counted once.
Beat me to it.

Thanks for the clarification. The way it was being read on the news today made it sound like it would make the 360's BC issues seem like a minor glitch.

I recall the PS2 having issues with a few PS1 games when it came to backwards compatibility so it's not like this is a huge surprise. Having only 200 games on the glitch list is pretty good.

[sanatos]

I think a better way to run the survey should have been to give the consumers that they are asking a spec. sheet and ask them to read it over quickly and based on what they see on the sheet, take a guess as to what the PS3 is worth.

Just asking schmucks off the street who don't know shit about the PS3 and then presenting the information in a biased fashion is not what I call a legitimate survey.
Testing the ability of people to price things based on specs is not the point of the survey. The point was to gauge the awareness of consumers on this issue. Why do you say this is biased? It seems pretty straightforward to me, and they didn't draw faulty conclusions like a lot of article writers. Of course, no one ever describes their sampling methods or gives a margin of error or anything useful.