donny2112 said:
PS2 will be up again once they lower the cost to $99. The problem is that the losses on the PS3 is what's probably keeping them from lower the cost on the PS2.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony drop the PS2 price to $100, but I don't think it is a sure thing at all. As you pointed out, Sony's gaming division has taken a beating in losses due to the PS3, and the PS2 is being used to help offset some of that beating.
Also, Sony said themselves that one of the driving forces for removing backwards compatibility from the PS3 was because they didn't want PS2 software sales to eat into potential PS3 software sales.
And finally - it would be financially difficult to justify another drop in price at this late stage. Dropping another $30 from the hardware price would be next to impossible to recoup from software sales. The only software still selling anymore on the PS2 is budget $20 software. For full-price $50 games, Sony got roughly $8 per game in licensing fees. But for $20 titles, Sony can't be getting much more than $3 or $4 per game at this point. So they would need to sell 9 or 10 pieces of software to each person who bought a $99 system, which if it ever gets to that price, it still won't get there for another several months. I'd be surprised if the actual attach ratio on $99 systems ever even got as high as 3 - it certainly would never come anywhere close to 9 or 10.
Now, there would be some other factors that would help Sony. Some of those software sales would be 1st-party software, where Sony would get a larger cut. And if Sony is still making a sizable profit on $99 hardware, then that profit from the increase in hardware sales would help to subsidize the price drop. But any hardware bump in sales would be relatively short-lived. The mass-market has already begun moving to the Wii in full-force. The PS2 is already the cheapest system out there by far, and it is dying. $99 would give a short-term spike, but I couldn't see it lasting. Very few publishers are developing anything for the PS2 anymore, and even Sony has moved on from the PS2.
And just to top it all off, a price drop on the PS2 would take even more attention away from the PS3, and possibly delay even more people from picking up a PS3. Not a situation that Sony is interested in pursuing.
If Sony would still be making a hefty profit on $99 hardware, and they believed that the sales spike due to a price drop would be both significant and sustained - then they may decide that it is in their interest. But just from a software perspective - it is too late in the cycle to ever recoup the price drop from increased software sales.
