While Sony has stated that it has no plans to cut the price of the PlayStation 3 this year, EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich now says that letting its lower-priced competitors stay unchallenged could be a mistake for the Japanese console manufacturer.

"We still urge Sony to consider a possible hardware price cut this holiday season," said Divinich according to Gamasutra. "If September hardware sales fall below our estimate (under 200,000 units), it could be an indication that the Xbox 360 price cut played a bigger role on hindering PS3 sales than what we originally expected."

With Sony banking on its lineup of exclusives such as Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet to entice new customers, Divinich points to an even stronger Microsoft software lineup and the prohibitive cost of a PlayStation 3 as reasons why the company may be making a mistake.

"The $399 price point is simply too steep to entice the casual and mainstream markets, regardless of how great Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet may be," he added, after noting that the Xbox 360 exclusive Gears of War 2 will likely be this holiday's top seller.

At $399, the cheapest version of the PlayStation 3 is the recently-upgraded 80GB SKU, with a $499 160GB model soon replacing the existing $499 80GB unit. Microsoft recently slashed prices on its Xbox 360 consoles, with the cheapest unit, the hard drive-less Arcade model, now priced at $199. Meanwhile, the 60GB Pro model now sells for an MSRP of $299. Post-price cut sales data has not yet been released for comparison.

Following up on word that publisher Electronic Arts was readying a line of Crysis-ready PCs, more details, including pricing and system specifications, have surfaced.

Priced at $699, the one and only Crysis Warhead PC was made with the involvement of EA, game developer Crytek, hardware maker Nvidia, and system builder UltraPC. It will launch alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16, and pack the following:

• CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
• Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
• RAM: 2GB

The system actually represents the internal benchmark Crytek Budapest used when developing the stand-alone Crysis expansion, and is said to run Warhead with High settings at an average of 30 frames per second. "For us as a team, that was really valuable," franchise producer Bernd Diemer told Chris Remo. "We... Read more

With the current console generation just now settled in most homes, many in the industry are thinking about the current set of machines lasting up to 2012, or even being the last set we ever need.

In the meantime, Nintendo's Wii might receive a facelift, says Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian as reported by EDGE Online.

Assuming the next console generation starts in 2012, Sebastian says Nintendo could use the next few years to "upgrade the Wii with faster processing power, DVD capability and/or greater storage."

Sebastian is far from the first to call out the Wii's common shortcomings compared to competing consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. He also recently called for the Nintendo DS to receive a refresh, a prediction echoed by other analysts.

Nintendo, per tradition, is keeping quiet on its plans. But with the company's reputation for surprising its audience with new hardware and providing hardware revisions, it's hard to imagine the maker following the rational predictions of an analyst.

Online retailer Amazon has tentatively priced Sony's PlayStation 3 Wireless Keypad at $49.99, according to the company's product page.

Amazon also lists the shipping date for the keypad as November 30, which would place the release on the weekend following Black Friday, the biggest day of the year for US retail sales.

Upon the accessory's unveiling last week, Sony noted that the product would arrive in November, but did not provide an official price point.

A wireless keypad with a touch-sensitive pad will be released for the PlayStation 3 in November, Sony announced today.

As it utilizes Bluetooth technology, the pad can be used with any other Bluetooth-compatible device, such as a smart phone or a laptop, and charges its battery via a USB connection.

With a toggle switch, the "entire surface of the keypad" can be used as a mouse-like touch pad, according to Sony.

"In this mode, you can slide your finger on this area to move the cursor on the screen and tap to enter," SCEA hardware marketing director John Koller wrote on the official PlayStation Blog. "There will be two short cut buttons on the Keypad that will enable users to jump directly to the XMB's 'Friends' icon and the 'Message Box' during gameplay."

While technology developers such as Epic Games and Crytek believe the next generation of consoles will appear in 2012, WildTangent CEO Alex St. John believes that the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii represent "the last generation of consoles."

"There's not going to be an Xbox 720 or a PS4, I'll make that bet, not going to happen," St. John told UK newspaper Telegraph. "The era of consoles defined by graphics and high-production values is over."

He explained that consoles are a "game-disabling experience" designed "to prevent you [from] playing games you didn't pay for," a technique he believes is rendered obsolete by games that require players to be online, such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft (PC).

"The principal reason that Sony and Microsoft get a cut of everybody's games is because they prevent piracy," he said. "This allows the publishers to invest more money in a game because they can be confident that it won't get stolen and will have to be paid for at a premium."

As for the Wii and its incredibly popular interface, St. John likened the Wii's focus on a motion controls to the peripheral-centric arcade games that signaled the arcade's demise. "The only arcade machines you can find left today are ones... Read more

Some 70% of professionals in the game development industry are currently at work on games for the PC, according to survey data presented by Game Developer Research.

The survey sampled 2,000 game development professionals from North America and elsewhere, in which 70% of participants said that they were currently developing titles bound for PC and Mac. 43% are creating games for consoles and 28% for web-based platforms, while just 16% of those sampled working on titles for handheld platforms.

Among the console developers, 73% of those responding to the survey are working on titles for the Xbox 360, followed by 58%—which includes some of those same Xbox 360 developers—working on PlayStation 3. 42% of participants reported work on the Wii, while 15% are creating games for the PlayStation 2.

Within those developers working on handheld platforms, the Nintendo DS held the lion's share of the raw numbers with 75% of the developers working on the system. 45% reported development on the PSP.

New listings and technical documents for a revised version of Sony's PSP handheld have appeared on the FCC's website, according to a Gizmodo report.

Going by the accompanying illustrations, the newest revision—model number PSP-3000—appears virtually indistinguishable from the most recently released version of the PSP hardware, the Slim and Lite PSP-2000.

The PSP-3000 hardware still makes use of the system's proprietary UMD media, and incorporates 802.11b Wi-Fi functionality similar to previous hardware iterations.

During a roundtable discussion at this year's E3, Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton stated that further hardware revisions would be aimed at securing the device and lowering manufacturing costs. Any substantial changes in the PSP-3000 will likely be internal, focused on preventing would-be pirates from cracking the oft-exploited handheld.

Sony has yet to make an official announcement for the hardware, but will likely reveal more information in the near future.

Hardware manufacturer ATI has launched the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, which it boasts as "the fastest and most powerful graphics card available today." That statement, ATI explained, is based on the card's "extreme top score of 6920" in the 3DMark Vantage v.101 benchmarking tool.

The dual-GPU card packs two HD 4800 graphic chips, said to provide "2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power," and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. To illustrate the card's performance, ATI provided the above benchmarks, comparing the HD 4870 X2 to rival Nvidia's GTX 280.

At present, the HD 4870 X2 is only available from online system builders such as Alienware and Falcon Northwest, carrying a suggested price of $549, with the card expected to hit retailers shortly.

A pared-down version that sports 1GB of GDDR3 memory, dubbed the Radeon HD 4850 X2, is slated to hit in September for around $399, according to TechReport.

Complete details on 4870 X2 and the benchmark machine follow... Read more

A new chip unveiled by hardware maker Intel is hoping to take graphics processing back to the x86 instruction set while still offering DirectX and OpenGL support, according to TechReport. The chip will be offered as discrete chip on motherboards as well as a standalone processor to compete directly with the GeForce and Radeon products.

Dubbed "Larrabee", the chip was unveiled at this year's SIGGRAPH conference and sports a variety of new technical features, including a fully coherent memory subsystem which allows for more efficient multi-chip implementation.

Should the x86-based graphical rendering capabilities prove viable to developers, Larrabee could serve as a cost-efficient alternative to expensive PC video cards, such as those produced by AMD and Nvidia. TechReport explains the chip... Read more

TechReport has the details on Nvidia's follow-up to its monstrous GeForce 9800 GX2 video card, the GTX 260 and GTX 280 Left, GTX 280. Right, GeForce 9800 GX2.

Whereas the massive 9800 GX2 runs in a two-GPU SLI configuration, the GTX 280 and 260 still only have one GPU. However, that single GPU nearly matches and even exceeds the performance of the GX2's two in many tests.

Once Nvidia enables SLI for the GTA 280 and 260 cards, it will most likely result in a near doubling of performance for top-of-the-line PC video cards. AMD-owned rival ATI is also expected to be announcing a new line of ... Read more