CCP - 28 April 2008 08:50 PM

I’ll give the nod to the Wii on this one. The 360 may be designed and built by fucking apes and the PS3 may be pricy, but at least they both have any games I give two shits about.

As for the scandinavian price of the PS3, its explained by the simple equation “lame ass dollar + huge ass scandinavian communism tax = nasty ass prices on just about anything compared to american standards”.

The lame ass dollar lowers prices on your end.

CCP - 28 April 2008 08:50 PM

As for the scandinavian price of the PS3, its explained by the simple equation “lame ass dollar + huge ass scandinavian communism tax = nasty ass prices on just about anything compared to american standards”.

Well, that’s for the normal higher price in Scandinavia… but the PS3 is higher yet. When the 360 and Wii (and just about everything else) have 10 SEK per Euro, the PS3 has 11.27 SEK per Euro… which may not sound as that much… but it’s a 12.7% increase out of nowhere… which actually puts us at 20% over the Euro price and 26% over the UK price unlike the standard 7-8% (which is how much higher our sales tax is against the UK VAT) and at the price of a PS3, that’s quite a difference.

Fun fact of the day. I could book tickets one month from now, take the bus to the airport, fly to London, take the train to central london, buy a PS3 at list price and take the same route back and save money compared to buy it anywhere in Sweden. I can’t do that to either of the other two consoles. I could probably take a car to germany and save money as well… you definitely could. And there’s no way the weak dollar can explain that since I keep it all within Europe… if I compare to the US, our list price is 88% higher

Jordan - 28 April 2008 09:02 PM

CCP - 28 April 2008 08:50 PM

I’ll give the nod to the Wii on this one. The 360 may be designed and built by fucking apes and the PS3 may be pricy, but at least they both have any games I give two shits about.

As for the scandinavian price of the PS3, its explained by the simple equation “lame ass dollar + huge ass scandinavian communism tax = nasty ass prices on just about anything compared to american standards”.

The lame ass dollar lowers prices on your end.

Actually, it doesn’t. It increases the price difference between us. The few products actually produced in the US and exported to Europe rides the cheap ride of all the american products made in Asia that isn’t affected by the weak dollar at all. So while the Euro is 60% more worth than the dollar, the general rule is that the European price is one Euro per Dollar. Most companies ignore the fact that this hasn’t been true since before the US invaded Iraq. Kudos goes to Microsoft for actually lowering the price of the 360 in Europe to reflect this… which actually makes both the Arcade and standard 20GB machine cheaper than the Wii here.

Whaleman - 28 April 2008 10:42 PM

Fun fact of the day. I could book tickets one month from now, take the bus to the airport, fly to London, take the train to central london, buy a PS3 at list price and take the same route back and save money compared to buy it anywhere in Sweden. I can’t do that to either of the other two consoles. I could probably take a car to germany and save money as well… you definitely could. And there’s no way the weak dollar can explain that since I keep it all within Europe… if I compare to the US, our list price is 88% higher

When I worked in the Apple store we had a couple guys who did just that, but for iBooks. I forget where they were from, but it was a Scandinavian country, and they said it was basically break even. Buy in their own country, or come to NYC for the weekend and get one there.

yellow#5 - 29 April 2008 03:01 PM

Whaleman - 28 April 2008 10:42 PM

Fun fact of the day. I could book tickets one month from now, take the bus to the airport, fly to London, take the train to central london, buy a PS3 at list price and take the same route back and save money compared to buy it anywhere in Sweden. I can’t do that to either of the other two consoles. I could probably take a car to germany and save money as well… you definitely could. And there’s no way the weak dollar can explain that since I keep it all within Europe… if I compare to the US, our list price is 88% higher

When I worked in the Apple store we had a couple guys who did just that, but for iBooks. I forget where they were from, but it was a Scandinavian country, and they said it was basically break even. Buy in their own country, or come to NYC for the weekend and get one there.

Yeah, they don’t have to cost that much for those 60% extra any european country pays (Apple actually lowered their prices recently too though… but not that much) to save the money for a trip to NY. If they came from Norway on top of that, they probably pay even more since they’re not part of the same EU trade agreements as we are… plus the everything is expensive as heck in Norway…. say the Swede… then it has to be bad

My vote goes to the overpriced failure of a system called the PS3. Sorry Sony, if I wanted a system where I have to install every freaking game on the hard drive I would have purchased a high-end gaming computer.

Auron - 02 May 2008 09:07 PM

My vote goes to the overpriced failure of a system called the PS3. Sorry Sony, if I wanted a system where I have to install every freaking game on the hard drive I would have purchased a high-end gaming computer.

Now that I think about it, where is the “All of the Above” option. I don’t own any of them, I love my computer.

While this is a moot point, anyone considering HDDVD to still be a viable media (ha) will now find the HDDVD Drive incredibly affordable on the Xbox now.  That is, if you enjoy the hand full of movies available for the format.

Also, with the 2.4 firmware upgrade, if your PS3 survived the procedure it makes the system fairly less shitty than it used to be.

I’d like to also knock the random 360 UI for some of its Live marketplace areas and promotions.  The Xbox download page looks completely different than anything else in the marketplace.  And that seemed to give away to the specially-designed download pages that you see now.