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LOS ANGELES – Sony said Tuesday it would cut the price of its popular PlayStation 2 console to $149, down from $179.
Sony has sold more than 70 million PlayStation 2s around the world, making it by far the most popular video-game machine on the planet. But Microsoft cut the price of its Xbox to $149 in March and began selling more machines than Sony.
Analysts had been expecting Sony to make the price cut. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube are each more than 3 years old, so the companies will have to rely on price cuts to keep sales going between now and the introduction of the next generation of machines, expected to begin as early as late 2005.
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EA gets behind Xbox Live: Electronic Arts, the largest publisher of video games, said Monday it agreed to produce several games for Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service, after holding out for several months. The companies said the first game would appear this summer.
At a wide-ranging press conference, Microsoft chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach introduced a lineup of celebrity athletes – including Muhammad Ali – to introduce the sports-heavy list of titles coming from EA, including hockey, baseball, football, soccer and boxing. The first title will be NCAA Football 2005, which is slated for a July release.
EA also plans to release non-sports games for Xbox Live, including titles such as GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Battlefield: Modern Combat and others.
The EA endorsement is a win for Microsoft. It makes its Xbox Live service – which lets Xbox owners compete against each other over the Internet – more attractive than a similar service offered by Sony for its PlayStation console. To date, Microsoft has sold about 14 million Xbox consoles, a distant second to the PlayStation 2 but gaining.
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Here comes PSP: Sony demonstrated the PlayStation Portable handheld video-game machine, first announced a year ago and set to be released by the end of 2004 in Japan and by March 2005 in the United States and Europe.
Sony will announce launch dates and prices later this year at the Tokyo Game Show. The PSP will weigh a little more than 9 ounces and feature a 4.3-inch screen in a wide-screen format. Sony will target it initially at men ages 18 to 34 years old.
The handheld will use Wi-Fi wireless networking and will have a battery life of two to 10 hours depending on usage. Sony executives showed several games, a promotional trailer for the movie Spider-Man 2 and a music video from the alternative rock band Incubus.
Sony executives said they would encourage movie and music companies to adopt its "UMD," a new disc designed for the PSP with about three times the data capacity of a standard CD.
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Saddle up, Marine: Halo 2, one of the most anticipated games of the year, will be released later this year.
Developer Bungie Studios said it will release Halo 2 on Nov. 9, 2004. It was originally supposed to go on sale in April.
Initially, Halo 2 will be available for Microsoft's Xbox game console. It is not clear when versions will be released for the PC or Mac.
Halo 2 is slated to be released in a collectors' edition package that will include two DVDs with documentaries about the making of the game, as well as galleries and developer commentaries.
Many analysts credit the success of the Xbox to the original Halo, a first-person shooter that puts the player in the shoes of a soldier fighting against a horde of aliens.
Daniel Terdiman in Los Angeles and Kourosh Karimkhany in San Francisco contributed to this report.
