New PS3 announced, slim and price drop

At the Gamescom convention in Cologne, Germany, Sony has announced the new slim PS3, but not only is it smaller, it's cheaper! The $299 console will include an 120GB hard drive. It will be available in stores on the first week of September. In comparison, the Wii $250 and the Xbox 360 Pro(60GB) is priced at $299, but a price drop for the Xbox 360 line is expected soon. The announcement mentions that it's slimmer, but I don't think it's as small as I was expecting it to be as a "slim" version. It's only a 36% reduction in weight, 32% in size, 34% in power consumption. That's a bit underwhelming. I think the big change here that should be appreciated is the price drop.

Personally I think this is too little too late. I am surprised though that they would drop the price so drastically. Some time ago, SCE(Sony Computer Entertainment) stated they wouldn't drop the price on the previous model because they weren't willing to take a loss on the price of the console. By the way, traditionally, console manufacturers have sold their consoles for less than the cost of making it, but received the bulk of their revenue from royalties that developers paid to make games on their console. So at the time, Sony was selling their console for $399 and refused to budge on the price which really hurt accessibility for their console. So with fewer PS3 gamers, there were fewer studios developing games for it, aside from the traditional lineup of Playstation exclusives; Metal Gear, Socom, Final Fantasy(before 13), a few newcomers like Little Big Planet, the PS3 trails behind in big name titles like Halo(yes I know we're all sick of hearing about it but it's fuckin popular), Gears of War, and Crackdown.

While it began as an accessibility problem in price, it has snowballed into much bigger problems. I don't think this is enough to save the falling market share that Sony is holding onto.

Here is a video of the demo of PS3 by Kaz Hirai of SCE.