Amid pomp and circumstance, Sony has announced the release date and prices for its PlayStation 3 video game console, underscoring a vigorous effort to keep itself fresh in the minds of video game fans.
The news conference Monday in Los Angeles was timed to coincide with the industry's annual trade show, an immersion into high-technology sensory overload known as E3, which starts Wednesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The other major console makers, Microsoft and Nintendo, were scheduled to make announcements Tuesday.
Sony plans to sell the base model of its PlayStation 3 video game console for $499 in the United States, a price that industry analysts said could put it at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft's Xbox 360.
Sony also said it planned to sell a higher-priced model in the United States with a larger hard drive for $599. The console will be introduced Nov. 11 in Japan and Nov. 17 in the United States and Europe, Sony executives said. It will cost about $536 in Japan and $636 in Europe.
The company also said that its hand- held controllers would enable players to manipulate activity on their screens for the first time. For example, players will be able to tilt their hands to make an airplane move to the side or to roll.
Sony said it planned to ship six million consoles by the end of March, including two million units when the system is introduced in the autumn.
The company had originally planned to begin selling the PlayStation 3 this spring, but said in March that it would postpone the release until November. The delay has given a full-year lead to Microsoft, which introduced the Xbox 360 last November.
The 360 sells at two prices in the United States, $299 for a basic system and $399 for a ramped-up one.
Paul Jackson, a video game industry analyst with Forrester Research, said the prices Sony revealed Monday would put the company at a disadvantage to Microsoft. The consoles will sell out at first because of the cult of PlayStation users, he said. After that, prices will have to come down quickly, he said.
But Sony executives tried Monday to make the case that the PlayStation 3 would be the most advanced gaming system to date, with enough features to justify its price.
Some of the game players, analysts and journalists gathered at the news conference said they were not convinced.
The system "is as expensive as I expected, and that is to say it is outrageously expensive," Chris Kohler, a free-lance video game journalist and avid game player who lives in San Francisco. He said that Sony had not made a sufficient case that the console's features justified the cost.
"What they showed looked very much like the games you can get on the 360," he said.
Even at the price announced Monday, Sony will probably sell the systems at a substantial discount to what it costs to make them, industry analysts said. The gap is attributable to the high cost of the console's components, notably its powerful cell processor and a high-definition DVD format called Blu-ray.
But the economics of the video game business can potentially support a model in which console makers subsidize their machines because they can make a lot of money by collecting royalty fees for games sold for those consoles. And further, Sony cannot afford to price its console too much higher than the 360.
The business stakes are immense for the leading console makers, and for the hundreds of companies that make video games and accessories for the consoles, as well as the investors banking that the industry will continue to grow.
Michael Pachter, a video game industry analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, said Microsoft would most likely have sold 10 million Xbox 360 consoles by the time the PlayStation 3 reaches the market.
Sony said it had decided to delay the console's release to allow software developers to create games that take better advantage of the powerful processor and graphics technology of the PlayStation 3.
Yet the delay has been painful for those software makers. Companies like Electronic Arts, a big video game maker, have said that the slower-than- expected transition to a new generation of consoles is one reason they are in a significant sales slump that is increasingly expected to last at least a year.
