Playstation 3 Cost

Reasons for the Playstation 3 Cost

Marketing new technology is always bad news. That is because it will be expensive and hard to manufacture, not to mention full of bugs and glitches. Such is the case with the Sony Playstation 3.

The hardware for Sony's Playstation 3 does not miss raw power, mind you. Being later to enter the arena of the seventh generation game systems than its competitor allowed Sony to embed the newest, state of the art, technology doohickeys into a monstrous capacity system, at the expense of the Playstation 3 cost.

And if you see the Playstation 3 cost, you'll gag at the monstrosity of it.

The first reason for the Playstation 3 cost is the Blu-ray drive component. Hardware analysts have judged the component to be the most expensive component within the Playstation 3 console. The optical Blu-ray drives are costly, with specifications that aren't clear yet. Sony should have added it as an optional add-on than integrate it into the system and furthering the cost whose known use is only added storage.

The next is the cell microprocessor. It is a new technology made by the collaboration of Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, so that means paying three fees for each Playstation 3 sold. It is clear though that this processor has power in floating point handling and thus can be seen a wise expenditure by some.

Another component that provide the bulk of the Playstation 3 cost would the NVIDIA Reality Synthesizer, the RSX GPU. But between the cell microprocessor and the Blu-ray drive, the RSX GPU should be much lesser of a burden.

Totaling it all, analysts have confirmed that the Playstation 3 cost would be somewhere around $800. And with the 20 GB Playstation 3 around $500 at retail stores, that means Sony is taking a bath with price loss for every console sold, at around $200 - $300.

Gag some more.

No wonder, there wasn't enough consoles released for worldwide demand; which was less than 500,000 for the North American market versus the demand roughly at one million. Sony could just take so much loss for every system sold. And truth to tell, console manufacturers don't receive profit from the consoles they sell, it's the licensing and the games released that make them a multi-billion dollar industry. But with only a handful of games at present, minuscule compared to those of Xbox 360, there's yet no bright future for Sony, the Playstation 3, and its consumers.