Sony president says Playstation 3 will be expensive

Sony president says Playstation 3 will be expensive
AT THIS WEEK'S Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation Meeting in Tokyo, company president Ken Kutaragi meandered along to continue with his solemn warnings that the PlayStation 3 will not be a cheap console, even going so far as to say that "…the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households."

Well err, who else were you thinking of selling it to? That aside, he does say that Sony is planning a lifecycle of ten years for the PS3, which is about double what its predecessors got. Sony hopes to maintain this long life-cycle by investing now in those expensive pieces of kit, saying "We're looking at a life cycle of 10 years with the PlayStation 3. We're currently shifting from standard TVs to HDTVs.

"But in the next couple of years, most flat-panel TVs will be full HD. We're releasing the PS3 with full HD features from the start so that consumers won't have to buy another version of the console in the future. For the same reason, we're using Blu-ray as the PS3's disc format."

He also showed the first slides of the early dev kits and told the audience that Sony intends to meet the huge demand from developers to get their hands on the technology by October, as at the moment the number currently shipped to developers is only around 450, though they’ll ramp that up to 3,000 a month come October.

We can’t help but get uneasy feelings in our stomachs about the PS3 considering that it’ll be coming to market so long after the Xbox 360 and with a price tag to boot. Wonder how far that loyal PlayStation fan base will stretch?