Sticker shock over PS3 pricing

Last night's announcement at E3 that Sony will charge $499 (20GB) and $599 (60GB) for the PlayStation 3 consoles triggered a collective freak-out among many bloggers who said that's just too expensive.

After all, those prices are significantly higher than Microsoft's Xbox 360, priced at $299 and $399. (It's worth mentioning that countless Xbox 360 consoles went for almost double the retail price after being put up on auction sites like eBay.)

Others say there's just no comparing the two, since Microsoft's console doesn't include a high-definition Blu-ray DVD drive for playing movies, or even a hard drive in the case of the $299 version. Standalone Blu-ray players are likely to cost close to $1,000 when they arrive later this year.

On that point, however, some bloggers are pointing to the lower-end PS3's lack of High-Definition Multimedia Interface output (click for PDF), which they say prevents the viewing of movies in high definition.

Blog community response:

"Sure, we can understand Sony not wanting to undercut sales of its own dedicated Blu-ray players by offering the $500 PS3 as a cheaper alternative. But if the company was hoping to use the gaming platform as a way to build a base of fans for HD discs, chances are the strategy is going to backfire the first time someone tries playing a Blu-ray flick in their 20GB version and discovers that the unit's lack of HDMI limits them to analog 1080i output (or worse, depending on a disc's use of HDCP)."
--Engadget

"All that money won't get you graphics that blow away your year-old Xbox 360, but it will get you a half-assed rip-off of Nintendo's motion-sensing controller that has Wii-tards banging their mushroom-shaped heads against the wall. If Microsoft drops their price by $100 as expected, they will clean up come Christmas."
--Xbox 360 Fanboy

"It seems far too expensive for me, especially when we haven't actually seen the games (unless you're at E3); a lot of people think that because the 360's GPU is better than the PS3's GPU, and that because the PS3's CPU is better than the 360's CPU, it will all equal out and you won't be able to tell the difference. I just hope that it will have something very significantly different from the 360 to justify that extra dough."
--the mini Blog