A smaller, cheaper Sony PlayStation 3 is coming in September. The PS3 Slim will have a starting price of $299, Sony said Tuesday.
Both Kmart.com and Sears.com have been promoting pre-orders of the PS3 Slim, and clicking the “pre-order” button takes the visitor straight to the shopping cart. The 80GB PS3 was priced at $399 and the 160GB PS3 at $499, but retailers have been lowering prices.
The long-rumored and thinner PS3 Slim video-game console is about a third smaller than the original PS3. Few details were immediately available after the unexpected confirmation from Sony.
“We’ve heard rumors about a lower-cost PS3 seemingly forever,” said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret. “It isn’t so much the notion of slimmer, but the notion of cheaper that becomes more important and helps Sony position itself as less expensive than previous versions.”
Driving PS3 Costs Down
On Tuesday morning, before the announcement from Sony, Kmart’s home page reportedly featured a rotating banner of the console, suggesting “The Rumors Are Reality: New Low Price & A New Exciting PlayStation 3.” The image showed a slimmer PS3 and two controls, but the image disappeared Tuesday afternoon.
“What exactly consumers will be getting for their money and what, if anything, they have to give up remains to be seen. We have to wait and see what the hard-drive capacity is,” Gartenberg said.
“You know it’s going to have a Blu-ray player. That’s an integral part of the PS3 experience. A lower price may also be a question of what Sony’s been able to do through integration and economies of scale that drive price points down.”
According to iSuppli estimates, it cost Sony $840 to build the original 60GB PS3 — without packaging or controls. Sony debuted the console with a $599 price in 2006 and has been dropping its prices to compete…