The PS3 lays down its cards

Today is arguably the most important day of E3. Nintendo and Sony will have their press conferences today, revealing their lineups for the PS3 and Wii launches this fall. Sony struck first yesterday officially announcing their prices for the PS3 and it’s not really a shocker. They’ll have to versions, just like the XBOX 360. A “standard” edition for $499.99 (that’s not a typo) and a “deluxe” edition for $599.99 and I will be buying neither. Although I’m sure the first run of the PS3 will sell out, I just can’t see too many casual gamers picking up a $500.00 price tag. I paid $399.99 for my “deluxe” 360 and that was pushing the envelope, $599.99 is just too much for me this time around.

The launch date for the PS3 will be November 17^th here in North America, and I expect there to be long lines of fan boys waiting to get their hands on one of the first PS3s. Most of them will then go sell that PS3 on e-bay for twice what they paid for it. If I do find one, I might do the same.

Nintendo has not announced a launch date for the Wii (which is by far the gayest name ever). They should make some kind of announcement during their press conference today. Most analysts expect the price to be between $200.00 and $300.00, and for there to be just one model. Personally I’m more excited about the Wii than the PS3. The new gaming possibilities with the Nintendo controller area really something that has me interested. While I wish they would have kept the “Revolution” moniker, I’m not going to not buy it because of the name.

While I’m sure I’ll end up with all three consoles eventually, the PS3 is last on my list. I really think the price point will hurt them and it makes me wonder if their push to get the blue-ray DVD disks into this system is really work the effort and cost. Sony wants to win the next-gen DVD format war (they don’t want a repeat of their lost, but superior in quality, Betamax efforts). Personally, I think HD DVD is the way to go since all current manufacturing processes can be retrofitted to make HD-DVD disks, and the cost is much cheaper. Microsoft was smart waiting to see how this played out. The current 5 gigs on DVDs provides more than enough space right now for games, and I don’t see a reason why games would need 30 gigs of storage at this time.

It was interesting to see that the PS3 can support 1080p, the highest HDTV resolution specification, especially since no one owns a TV that can display that. Okay, okay, sure, some people do, I’ve seen TVs that support this at the store. However, there is no TV programming available for 1080P, and that won’t be changing due to bandwidth issues any time soon, so what force other than the PS3 is driving the urge to get a TV with 1080P? We’ll have to see if this helps move the TV market at all.

As I said, the press conferences are later today and I’ll be sure to post on anything substantial. After the conferences the first playable demos on the new hardware is supposed to be available, so we’ll see what things are like when people finally get their hands on some of this stuff.

-Steve