Beyond3D today ran an interview
with NVIDIA's Co-founder, President and Chief Executive
Officer, Jen-Hsun Huang, conducted at the company's
Editor's Day this past June. The Editor's Day was held
to give the press details and a close look at its then-forthcoming
GeForce 7800 GTX graphics processor, but as Sony had
just announced the PlayStation 3 a few weeks prior
at E3 in Los Angeles, NVIDIA's head honcho was pegged
with a few questions regarding the next-gen system
that NVIDIA will be supplying the GPU for.
A section of the interview seems to confirm the PlayStation
3's rumored hefty price tag:
But [GeForce] 7800 [GTX] has now firmly exceeded the
perceived $499 price barrier...
I'm not even too sure there is a perceived barrier
at $499. We need to price it at a level the enthusiasts
will buy it at, that's the way that we think about
pricing. We think about the pricing of this in the
same way that Sony thinks about PlayStation 3's - its
not about how much is costs, its about what is the
price it needs to sell at, and we need to figure out
how to make money underneath that.
In late June, Sony's Ken
Kutaragi strongly suggested that the system will
carry a high price tag when he said, "Our goal
for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves,
'I will work more hours to buy one'. We want people
to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything
else."
The curious part about this is that NVIDIA's Editor's
Day was held before Kutaragi's comments were published,
suggesting that Jen-Hsun Huang already knew that Sony
was planning to release the console above the common
$299 launch price for a new system, possibly far above
it. At a minimum, it now sounds like Kutaragi isn't
the only person directly involved with the PlayStation
3 to claim that it'll be expensive.
