Sony did not currently plan a European price reduction following the US$100 cut introduced in the United States several weeks earlier. Germany manager Uwe Bassendowski said at the Games Convention that a recent bundle containing a second controller and two games had been well received.
By the end of the current financial year in March 2008, Sony planned to sell half a million PlayStation 3 consoles in Germany. Around 125,000 units were then installed in German households.
The company’s new-generation console had initially remained below Sony’s expectations worldwide. PlayStation 3 includes an IBM multicore processor and a Blu-ray drive for films and games in HD. At €599 it was the most expensive console on the market. The US price had been reduced to US$499 in July. Microsoft subsequently cut the price of Xbox 360 and also lowered its European pricing.
Sony was the only console manufacturer still successfully marketing its preceding model. “With PS2 we have the horse pulling the cart,” Bassendowski said. In its eighth year, PlayStation 2 had reached five million German households. During the first seven months of the year, it held 42 percent of Germany’s home-console market, followed by Nintendo Wii at 26 percent, PlayStation 3 at 21 percent, and Xbox 360 at 11 percent.
At the Games Convention in Leipzig, Sony also showed a slimmer successor to its PlayStation Portable. The revised PSP included a video output for playing films stored on Sony’s UMD format directly on a television.
