Apparently there is a single guy who is intimately acquainted with the internal doings of both Microsoft and Sony. Double agent? Contractor? Seducer? Nobody knows but Ars Technica, who enjoy exclusive access to his oracular expectorations. Er, his tech predictions. It looks like both the PS3 and 360 are due for a price drop, via the Tetris effect, which I have just now invented. It’s where products are stacked on top of each other, and once you score on the bottom, that row of products disappears and is replaced by the one above it. Apple does it year after year with the iPhone, and now it looks like console makers are about to do it again as well.
360 Elites will be replacing the Pro at the $300 level, after Pro inventory has been reduced via bundle deals. Makes sense, especially when you consider that a new 360 offering (with Project Natal) will be coming out in 2010, taking up that premium slot.
As for the PS3, we all know it’s been due for a price drop for a long time,if not since launch, and now with that slim PS3 on the way, it’s time to crush the prices a bit and get rid of the bottom row. The mole didn’t give any specifics, but I’m guessing they’ll be phasing out the lower-end system and replacing it at around that price with the 160GB version.
Of course, we get rumors like this all the time, but this guy is supposed to have a pretty good track record. We can’t count on Microsoft and Sony to confirm anything (since deception is their natural state), and we can also ignore anything they say in the negative, since they blatantly lie about that stuff too. Might it actually be time for me to move up from my Dreamcast to a current console?