Yesterday Sony announced its next-generation gaming console, the PlayStation 4, and while they didn"t show the actual console or the price, Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony America, hopes the PlayStation 4 won"t cost $599 at launch.
In a interview with All Things D Tretton noted that the PlayStation 3 debuted at $599, which was an extremely steep price barrier for a lot of consumers. He was then asked if the new console would cost $599 to start:
I certainly hope not. I think we’re very proud of what we delivered with the PlayStation 3 in terms of technology and that we were able to enhance the features while still reducing the price to $249. But I think our goal with this is to debut at a more consumer-friendly price. But we haven’t made any final decisions about what the price will be at launch.
In the interview he also says that the console"s "still in development in terms of final specs and designs." Currently, the PlayStation 4 features an 8-core 64-bit x86 "Jaguar" CPU build by AMD, a Radeon GPU with 18 compute units which push out 1.84 TFLOPS, and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM memory.
While Sony could still make some changes to the PlayStation 4, it"s unlikely any drastic modifications will be made before it launches later this year.
Source: All Things D