Sony PlayStation: The Price Heard Around the World - "299" - (E3 1995 Keynote)

What people said

kotaKat · 2026-03 · Reference

Meanwhile I guarantee sitting on a university campus I’m going to see a sea of these colours sitting on desks and tables by people putting in some serious work. In this age of price hikes on components and hardware, this is Apple’s “price heard around the world” like they were on stage at E3 in 1995.[1] Ironically they pulled it off with Sony’s worst price at an announcement… five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars . [1] [VIDEO]

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TMWNN · 2024-09 · Reference

It's just below "$299" < [VIDEO] > among the greatest moments of console marketing. (The single greatest moment isn't one moment, but turning an obscure technical description into "blast processing". < [LINK] >)

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iforgotpassword · 2020-12 · Reference

This mostly. Although our view on this might be biased, the were reportedly severe tensions between Sega of Japan and the West (mostly America). As the story goes, the Japanese HQ wanted to assert dominance over the imperitent westerners, since after all the American video game market crashed while Japan succeed. When SGI first contacted Sega of America with their 3D hardware they were thrilled and tossed it to HQ, which shot it down since the Saturn was supposed to bring the arcade experience into the living room and didn't need 3D. SGI then showed their stuff to Nintendo... Then when Sega saw that Sony and Nintendo did 3D, they panicked and bolted on some 3D capabilities last minute resulting in an architecture that makes the PS3 look easy to code for. Then at E3 1995, they suddenly announced an earlier release date for the console than what was communicated to all the developers pissing those off, with a release price of 399. This lead to Sony's legendary press conference for the PS1 directly after Sega's: [VIDEO]

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