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Is Blu-ray Worth More Inside A PlayStation?
Electronics | Oct 24, 08
With the price of Blu-ray players falling, you might think the Blu-ray laden PlayStation 3 would be marked down as well. So far, you’d be wrong.
Strand-alone Blu-ray players have been falling in price in the face of general weakness in electronic retail sales (see “Recent Price Drops in AMD Processors, Blu-ray Players May Auger Retail Weakness”). Consider for example Sony’s BDP-S3250, currently the most popular Blu-ray player on PriceSCAN. it was seling in July for $400, and is now offered by merchants for less than $260.
Time Period: 6/30/2008 through 10/20/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price
Further, Microsoft recently cut the price of its entry level Xbox system to $199. Yet despite competitive pressure and a soft economy, as of this writing Sony has not cut the price of the PS3, so that we’re still seeing the console priced at $399.
This is interesting because it might imply that Sony feels Blu-ray embedded in a PS3 retains more of its value, perhaps because of some synergy with the gaming environment. The PS3 may have also already represented a “bundled” discount, since even with the current drop in Blu-ray pricing it’s only about $150 more than a stand-alone Blu-ray player, a difference which is some $49 less than the price of the cheapest Xbox.
It will be interesting to see if PS3 prices stay firm as we enter the holiday shopping season, or if general economic weakness and lower cost alternatives like Xbox the ever-popular Wii take their toll. Whether Sony’s pricing is dumb or smart may turn on whether the PS3 is more than the sum of its parts.
Hey, that last line sort of rhymes…nothing like the poetry of a rapidly deteriorating retail environment.
Posted by jeffrey.trester (Permalink)
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