I sometimes wonder why companies like Sony don't just open a manufacturing plant in the UK and start to sell things at the true price, rather than shipping them from the other side of the world (think of all the carbon...). Oh wait, it's because they want to protect their incomes by forcing the price up much higher than the actual cost.

Feck.

Well, I'll still not buy one until it's less than the Japanese or US launch price. £390 is still too much.

Feck.

>I sometimes wonder why companies like Sony don't just open a

>manufacturing plant in the UK ....rather than shipping them from the o ther

>side of the world

Because it uses less carbon to ship PS3s into Britain than it would to ship in enough Polish "British" workers to make them.

Besides, whether or not you'd pay £390 for one...there aren't enough here that'll accept that £390 for assembling one.

e.g Alan Sugar's "apprentice" will give you a 30 minute talk for £2k+vat about a console. You could ask at the end why Siralan couldn't get a team together to pee in jars and sell them for less than £500 each, let alone build a console.

Sony is going to lose, big-time. The Nintendo Wii is a fraction of the price of the Xbox 360 and PS3, and can't be found in stores because it's so popular.

The PS3, on the other hand, is languishing on store shelves - unwanted - because it's so expensive; nobody would pay £400 for what is just a games machine. Nintendo's pricing has set the benchmark for what the casual gamer is willing to pay, and the fact is there aren't enough über-serious gamers out there to satisfy Sony's business model.

Sony has screwed up. Royally. Even during the intial sales boom, Sony still has consoles to spare. This is a really bad sign, especially when developers are eyeing up the Xbox 360 and Wii (due to their obvious success).

Give it about a year - maybe 18 months, and the PS3 will be going at fire-sale prices. Of course, by then, the platform will already be dead - and the consoles still won't be worth the price you pay for them.

Oliver.

to recover from stagering loss of their PS3.... by making it more expensive in adding a larger hard drive.

Yeah.. makes perfect sense to me.

Thought they where trying to find a way to make it cheaper... why add larger hardware!?

Sony would do much better by rearranging the internals to allow for the hard drive to be plugged in through an external box. If we had an external hookup we could use much larger and cheaper drives. Then maybe get the power supply to be removable and upgrade the system to PS 3.1 to give us memory slots.

People gripe about the cost of the PS3, but in reality it's not that much more expensive than a PC. I would be worlds happier with it if they would just give us more RAM so I could use it as a regular PC.

Given the way economics works in hard drives, I wouldn't be surprised if the 80G part was actually cheaper than the 60, these days. The volume is driven by capacity, and the sweet spot seems to be around 100G. That would make demand for 60G parts significantly down compared to 80G parts. Given therefore that more factories will be making 80G drives, I would expect them to actually come in cheaper than the 60G ones. The differential is not enough for industrial customers to be pushing demand for 60G parts in the way they do for the much smaller 20G parts.

They should just dump the DVR and stick to making a game console. PS2 Works great without a DVR. They are selling something that the gamers do not really need.

Just more overpriced junk.

Sony is run by idiots.

the fact that they CAN sell it for 281+VAT in another country speaks absolute

volumes about how much extra money they are grabbing from UK customers

(yes, I know they are still losing money with each sale...but they appear to

be happy extra-subsidising other nationalities. its the same with the games for these consoles - and why regional lockouts are not only immoral and evil

but also why people go down the mod-chip route (granted, many do it for illegal reasons) but I want access to the games that are being played elsewhere in the world - and for similar cash thanks!

its not just in the gaming world either. the software world is just as bad...not just MS Vista ripping off brits - and MacOSX is the same before anyone accuses me of discrimination here. little hint - when upgrading your anti-virus licence for next years cover..DONT buy it in UK or pay in sterling. pay the US rate - save yourself about 20 quid.

on the software title on PS 3

I think that is the only good point of a PS 3

what you all dont seem to grasp is that although we appear to be paying more for it in reality we arnt... in the states their income is less than ours generally, so its fixed on that.. also exchange rates have to be taken into account, the £ is very strong against most cuurencies so where always going to look bad

and as for the comment about sony run by idiots.. if you think you can do better then why not start up a company yourself and see how easy it is

Maybe it's me, maybe I was the last of the people around when the first Playstation came out (yeah I'm that old!), but it launched at £400.00 (with no games, single controller and no memory card) and slowly over 22 months dropped to the £149 bracket, all the while beign filled with cheaper and cheaper components...gold-plated contacts, SVHS/Comp outputs, seperate internals...sound familar to anyone?

Before they were launched here in the UK, we used to sell "gray" (or is that "grey") imports for £1k....try playing Ridge Racer and Tekken when everything is in Japanese....it's not meant for mass market, but hard-core gamers...you don't like it, don't buy it

I went onto Ebay, and posted a wanted a PS3 at £310 including delivery, I got loads of responses. Why do we have always pay more in Europe. The sad truth is , we pay more in this country because manufacturing think they can get away with it. But this time...its backfired. Sony needs to get this excellent piece hardware into peoples homes. How you may ask... They have too lower the price of the console under £300 mark, and include a game or two and they have to do this before 2008. Microsoft have only really two games that sell the Xbox , Halo and Forza nothing else. The PS3 ports seem to be more fluid than its Windows XP counterpart. The CEO of Sony needs to listen to the market before the rot sets in. Im a punter who wants a PS3. I wont by it at the price released I will wait until December like most. I thought the Xbox 360 Premium was expensive on release and still is, so why would any buy PS3 for £400 and not buy a PC or 2 excellent Nintendo WII (if you can find any). Sony needs to sort itself out and its such an easy thing to fix... Maybe Sony should offer me job....

I would agree with wages being less in the states but it depends where you go and anybody who has recently been will notice the sharp rise in costs in general, e.g glass of Stella (not a pint, about as much as you get in a bottle of bud/becks) $4.50, that works out at around the $9.00 per pint or £4.50 in our money, the place aint as cheap as people harp on these days.

Regards PS1 being launched at £400, it was actually launched at £299.99 and came with playable demos of Demolition Derby and some soppy platform game among others.

The crux of the matter is, a lesser console for more money, they are stiffing us and even if it does come down in price, by the time it does we could be looking at another dead format like the Philips CDI or the Panasonic 3D0 so you wont be able to get any games for it. Given that some software houses have pulled out of development for the PS3 already, this could run true and serve them right.

Come the revolution, brothers unite, lets dig up Wat Tyler, He'll know what to do.