PS3 price cut only to clear 60GB stocks.

Sony's had announced yesterday that the recent price cut for the USD499 60GB PS3 will only be effective for all its current inventory. As Sony has an estimated 2 - 3 million inventory stocks, its expected to "fire-sale" its inventory within one year.

After Sony made this new announcement, it was clear that they are phasing out the 60GB models and replacing them with the 80GB models. This was similar to them removing the 20GB models from production earlier this year.

As I see it, they are trying to boost up the sales rate for the PS3, while moving to bring production costs lower. This is crucial as they will want to build a bigger user base for them to have keep big named games developers support, as well as to have exclusive games to the PS3. As staunch PS2 exclusive games developers have started developing games for the Xbox360 (games like GTA4 and Devil May Cry 4 comes to mind), Sony will be very eager to have a bigger user base to keep having exclusive games (Metal Gear Solid 4 is exclusive to PS3).

Having a bigger user base will also help boost demand for blu-ray products, which will lower production cost as demands increases. At the same time, as the PS3 is the cheapest blu-ray movie player in the market, increases in PS3 sales will equate to more blu-ray movie demands and that keeps the movie studios happy to stay exclusive to blu-ray.

My expectations is that once the current 60GB inventory have depleted, they would have gotten better and is producing cheaper 80GB models. By then, they may announce the 80GB to be selling at USD499, yet another USD100 price cut. I expect this announcement to come during E3 2008, or in Fall of 2008, which is the traditional shopping period for the holidays season.

Let me be the 1st in MY to predict this to happen, wanna quote me as saying it??

Also, please note that the 60GB price cut and the 80GB PS3s mentioned in this article is only for the North America region (US and Canada) only. No price cuts have been announced for PAL regions like Europe or Australia, or even in Asia. Will post the news if Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong decides to announce any new price or the 80GB PS3 Asian version.