Sony Chops PS2 Price News

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) today announced a Playstation2 price-cut in Japan, in a bid to bolster decreasing sales of the ahead of the Christmas period.<br><br>As of November 13th SCE will reduce the recommended retail price from 25000 yen to 19800 yen, whilst also introducing a new colour in ‘Midnight Black’.<br><br>The firm recently announced that sales of the games division had fallen by 37%, sending operating profits plunging by 91% in the three-month period to September 30th.<br><br>Sony has invested more then 300 billion yen since 1999 to streamline the PS2 by almost 80%, seemingly backing up <a href=http://www.totalvideogames.com/?section=Read%20News&id=4109&gameid=2803&format=000006>yesterday’s talk of a ‘PStwo’</a> being introduced at some point.<br><br>In addition the Japanese firm announced massive changes at a corporate level. As of 2006 the company will completely abandon its current structure in place of a dual-layer system involving four different divisions – a stock holding parent company, a hardware company, a content company and a financial holdings company.<br><br>The move has been viewed as a way of joining the two current disparate divisions of Sony Corp and Sony Computer Entertainment, as a result the Playstation and other devices will be manufactured along other Sony equipment such as the VAIO and WEGA range of computers and TV’s. The software side of SCE would be absorbed into the new content company, whilst the financial holdings division has been set up to ease the financial burdens currently associated with running two distinctively different companies.<br><br>The union of Sony Corp and Sony Computer Entertainment can already be seen in the soon-to-be-released PSX – a device built upon the PS2 that also features a satellite TV tuner, DVD recorder and a HDD recorder; whilst it’s been suggested that Sony Corp have had a heavy involvement with the development of the Playstation3.<br>