Sony's $399 PS3 confirmed by Best Buy?
Thanks to a helpful tipster, we have a couple of Best Buy documents showing a $399 Playstation 3 with 40GB disk and Spiderman 3 (yes, Blu-ray) bundle with an "In Stock Date" of October 28. However, the more important "Street Date" field is unfortunately empty at the moment.
Context & Ripple Effects
The leak lands during a bruising month for Sony's public image: confirmed criticism over bungled first-generation games and cynical press coverage, the WikiScanner exposure of its Halo 3 Wikipedia edit, a second rootkit discovery, and the shutdown of its own music download store — even as PSP sales overtook the DS in Japan. Against that backdrop, the hardware story matters more than usual.
What the documents show fits the strategic pivot already visible in Sony's August announcement of a high-definition DVR for the PS3 in Europe: the machine being pitched as a living-room media hub first, game console second. A $399 configuration bundling Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray would extend exactly that pitch into the holiday shelf.
First-order effects
- If the bundle ships as the documents indicate, Sony's entry PS3 configuration drops to $399 with a Blu-ray film included — but the empty "Street Date" field means neither Best Buy nor Sony has committed to timing, leaving the October 28 in-stock date as the only hard number.
- Best Buy gains the merchandising initiative: shelf-ready SKU data for an unannounced configuration lets it plan floor space and pricing ahead of any official Sony word.
Second-order effects
- Every discounted PS3 sold doubles as a Blu-ray player sold, so a cheaper holiday bundle seeds the disc-format installed base at retail precisely when format competition is sharpest.
- The move sharpens the head-to-head with Microsoft's Xbox 360 — pressure already visible in Sony's exposed attempt to downplay Halo 3 on Wikipedia — making a price-tier response on the rival side more likely heading into the holidays.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to game consoles functioning as subsidized Trojan horses for disc formats, with Sony's DVR positioning and this bundle both treating the PS3 as delivery hardware for Blu-ray rather than a standalone product line.
- Retailer inventory systems are becoming the de facto pre-announcement channel for console hardware — a single leaked SKU forcing manufacturers to confirm or deny configurations they had not yet staged publicly.
The trend: Console makers are using cheaper hardware revisions to push their disc formats into living rooms, with retail database leaks doing the pre-announcement work for them.