August console sale estimates and PS3 price drop speculation

[Zabka]

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=17352

While Wedbush Morgan is a fairly small boutique, its gaming analyst seems to have captured the attention of the media (I don't know about Wall Street since I don't cover the space). Their analyst predicts that 360 sales were boosted to 240K in August (up from 170K in July) and the PS3 sales dropped somewhat to 150K after the surge they got in July.

Good news for potential PS3 owners, however, is that he believes the price cut to $499 on the 80 gig PS3 will come ahead of Thanksgiving and believes that the price will drop to $399 by April 08. Of course he has no real insight into price cuts of this sort, but probably has as good of a feel for the market dynamics as anybody out there. I would guess that the 360 will also cut prices in08.

Next gen consoles are getting cheaper everyone.

[Grejo]

it's just the super powers of the gaming world competing to get people's money. it's good for us, but if this continues, won't they lose profits and then have to charge more for map packs and idk any other updates that they release? i mean the 80 gig PS3 started at what, 600 bucks? and now it might drop to 400? that's 200 more dollars in your pocket and 200 less in theirs. that's a huge profit.

and how much do you really think it would cost sony to make a complete 80 gig PS3 with all the normal things that's included in the product? they're getting closer and closer to just breaking even and i KNOW Sony isn't nice enough to deal with that, so wtf is going on?

this also applies to microsoft and the 360, how is price drops gonna help the company if they're dropping it by 100 dollars at a time?

what i'm concerned with really is what the companies are thinking. hell i know it's great to keep hundreds of dollars in my own pocket, but how is this affecting everything else? games? updates? future consoles?

[RaTix]

As always , it's never about the actual consoles themselves, but rather the licensing fees to 3rd party developers. The more consoles they sell, the more demand with the developers to want and get in on the action and develop for that console. The games and licensing is where the money is made back.