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RSSPlaystation 2 price cut to US$99
March 31, 2009 | Game News, Gaming | 0 Comments
There were rumours of a PS3 price cut over the past few weeks, and Sony categorically stated “the PS3 will not get a price cut”. Little did the rumour-mongers realise that Sony was indeed planning a price cut, but just not on their behemoth PS3, but on their aging PlayStation 2 console.
The price drop of 30% comes one year short of Sony’s bet on their consoles lasting at least a decade, and the PlayStation 2 is definite proof that Sony’s bet is paying off. The cut doesn’t come as a big surprise to a lot of people in the industry, as the PlayStation 2 is almost 10 years old, and with almost 2000 games in its library, sales are still going strong for the little console-that-used-to-be.
SCEA’s John Koller, director of hardware marketing, announced the price cut on the PlayStation Blog earlier today, and was quoted in saying:
“In the gaming industry, the typical lifecycle for a console is around five years, but because we build each of our platforms for a large and diverse consumer base, we design our platforms differently,”
“With the original PlayStation and now PlayStation 2, we’ve proven that consumers can rely on our platforms for their gaming and entertainment needs for at least a decade.”
Sony also said that there will be a price cut in European countries, the price dropping to €99, but that there will be no price drop in the United Kingdom.
Even though some might think the aging PlayStation 2 is a hopeless case against the XBox 360 or big-brother PlayStation 3, or even the Nintendo Wii, with more than 136 million consoles sold worldwide, over 50 million of those in the US alone, and companies such as EA and Disney still releasing games for it, the console definitely still has at least another year or two in it. Fantastic games such as Rock Band, Guitar Hero, God of War 1 and 2, and the incredible Okami, amongst many other games, are all available for it, family games such as Ben 10 and the Buzz! series of games are also still very popular, and not to forget that the PlayStation 2 is a DVD player, and now more than ever has it become the preferred DVD player to buy.
Still no word if Sony South Africa will adopt the price cut here locally, not that it matters, there are still plenty promotions and hardware combos abound in local shops, including massive support at Incredible Connection, with a large library of PS2 games on sale at all the stores. Now, if only we can get price cuts on accessories such as controllers and memory cards as well.
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