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"Money Money Money!!! Whats the Point!"

As a lot of gaming companys have noticed that gaming attracts money to there buisness. And that if they make a succseful game money will come rolling in!

But sometimes it goes to far. I think putting a game console at £300 is ridiclous. This is only going to put people off buying a PS2, If they started the PS2 off at £200, many more people would of bought one.

I dont think PS2 has had a very sucsseful start in England, first it is far to expensive for people to afford and also there were hardly any in the country.

For a console to have a good futre it has to have a good start, this is proven with the PSX. That has to be the most succesful console at this time, it even beat off the DC which is a newer and with a better memory and speed, but again people setteld with there cheap, but brilliant PSX. Where every ounce of polygon and memory has been used!

:)

Youre right Spider 2 I think the PS2 will end up like the DC over here.

But at the moment computer console and videogaming is where all the money is at at the minute, look at Bill Gates, he might not have the best haircut in the world but he is earning over 2million every second.

It is also a good job if youre into computer's and games. You start off at college go through all the com.programming and then start working for a respectabele company ala Rareware, and then slowly with the money you get from that job start up your own and create good games and then you might get noticed and you might finally be able to get your own console!

The thing is, the original Playstation was at least £300 at release, so to release a new console years later, at the same price, that also includes DVD playback, is quite remarkable!

Back in 1995 or so Special Reserve were selling Rise of the Robots on the SNES for £51.99. I bet you can't find any single game (without accessories) more expensive than that today, can you?

Thats over everything, i.e. tax on development cost, packaging, transport, advertising and sales tax.... and yes its a disgrace.

44% tax! bloody hell, the system sucks dont it. no point in a petition, nothing ever seems to change.

I think the problem with expense has more to do with Tax than companies ripping us off, 44% of the cost of developing a N64 game is tax, a petition to lower tax would be a good idea.

Of course Sony were right to sell the PS2 at £300. They sold all of the consoles at that price and there was a shortage of them. They could have probably got away with selling it for £350. The original psx was £300 when it first cam out so i dont see why people are complaining about the PS2 seeing as it has a DVD player as well. But i reckon sony well definitly drop the price to £200 when the Gamecube comes out.

I think Sony were right to put a £300 starting price tag on the PS2.

People in general agree that a reasonable starting point for a new console is around the £200 mark.

However, there are afew possible factors that would surely have been in Sony's minds when deciding their pricing policy:

1. Most importantly, they didn't want to put the machine within everyone's grasp immediately as that would have near wiped out the PSX market. OK there is backwards compatability, but not many gamers buy software for 'old' machines (i.e. PS2 owners would much rather pay out on PS2 games than on PSX games - regardless of quality).

2. If the above happened, software companies would waste development time and money on games which no longer had a market. This would have resulted in them losing faith in Sony and switching their primary focus to X-Box or other.

3. Competition (X-Box, GameCube) were still in development and some way off release. This meant Sony could counteract points 1 & 2 above by introducing PS2 and phasing the price down until the competition's releases. PS2 is already at £270, and likely to be at least £50 cheaper by the time X-Box and GC are released with 3rd generation software.

4. Sony weren't marketing PS2 as purely a games console. The inclusion of DVD and potential for other add ons (e.g. MTV Music Generator sampling kit) meant that they wanted to appeal to an older market, rather than pure gamers.

5. The release of the machine just before the DVD market boom was a masterstroke. At the time of PS2 release, the cheapest DVD machine on the market was around £150-175 pounds. Taking this into account, the 'game console' element of PS2 was costing around £150. This gave the machine family appeal - parents wanting DVD, children wanting the new games - in one black box with one plug at a reasonably priced combination. There is now a DVD price war, with PS2 able to compete because of their own price drop and delays in their competition releases.


I agree that many more people would already own a PS2 if it was released at £200, but Sony couldn't have afforded to do that because of points 1 & 2, and they didn't need to because of 3-5.

OK some people may now want to wait for X-Box and GC - at Sony's expense, but PS2 will still be on a lot of Christmas lists in the others absence.

As for the comment of a console needing a good start as proven with PSX, PS2 has far outstripped PSX sales at the same point after release (10 million and counting).

As for every ounce of polygon and memory? Were they really being fully utilised at 6 months after release?

Keep your memories of current PSX releases (Simpsons Wrestling, Time Crisis:Project Titan etc) and compare them to PS2 games at 4-5 years after release, when the games will be cheaper and PS2 will cost less than £100. At that time you will undoubtedly praise it as being a cheap, but brilliant machine!!!

I find It amazing now how the Playstation cost's more than the Nintendo 64, in my local Currys there selling the Pikachu one for £59.99 and an old Playstation for £79.99 but surely this can not be making Nintendo money, either Nintendo were ripping everyone off who bourght an n64 for £250 and Nintendo were making like a £210 profit or nowwer days Nintendo are losing Money rarther than gaining it.
Does anyone know how much it costs Nintendo to make an N64?

the PSX must have a very low level polygon cos the graphics are sh*te

Nintendo realised this with the N64. It was released at £250 but very soon after thousands of people had bought it, it dropped down to £150. Soon after that however it was dropped again to £100. Thank you very much Nintendo a great machine at the time for an affordable price.

(;o|