$150 PlayStation 3 discount [update 1]
by Vladimir Cole 
{ Dec 30th 2006 at 1:31AM }
Thanks to a promotion by Sony Style (Sony's retail operation), folks who sign up for a Sony-branded credit card by January 4, 2007 and who purchase stuff with said card by March 31, 2007, will receive $150 off of their first credit card statement.
If you're feeling charitable towards Sony as a result of their generosity, you could apply the $150 bonanza to your purchase of a PlayStation 3, bringing the price of that budget-busting beast into blue-collar range.
On the other hand, if you're the Billy Joe-Bobby Sue type, take the Sony card and run to your preferred online retailer who'll be more than happy to sell you an Xbox 360 or a Wii, either of which -- at $150 off -- would be a very nice deal.
[Update 1: lots of questions appearing in the comments ... check out this Fatwallet thread for answers.]
[Thanks, Mike!]
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Metal Ghost @ Dec 30th 2006 10:02PM
Wow, when did this thread stop being about this Sony credit card deal and start being about fanboy rants?
Pathetic, absolutely pathetic.
Shagi @ Dec 30th 2006 11:22PM
Yeah beacuse all the comments about how much items cost when you reduce them by 150.00 was awesome.
Mateo @ Dec 30th 2006 11:59PM
"Casual gamers dont drive the market beacuse they don't buy as many games as the hardcore gamers do." -Shaqi
Wow. I am sorry but you are incredibly stupid. Reading your posts is akin to a child telling a story-- they are riddled with, as someone stated, "Faulty logic" and half-truths. Any credibility you might have had in your posts has now been completely shot.
dvddesign @ Dec 31st 2006 12:31AM
That's sweet. If we've got till late march, then I can sit on the card and wait for a price drop from MS on the Xbox, if that happens... If not, meh, who cares... $250 on an 360 is still cheaper than full retail right now...
Remember, all those discounts that MS is cutting for TRU and MicroCenter say alot about what's coming in the next few months for the 360.
Oh and Shagi? I thought you were a Sony fanboy? Why would you spout a line about "shlocky games" and be a Sony Fanboy?
I mean, Sony's the company that brought us Fantavision, Genji 2, "Tilt-o-matic" Lair, The Bouncer, and Final Fantasy VII part III. I know everyone's got their crap titles, (Fusion Frenzy? Lookin' at you...) but lay off the line about how a glut of crappy game designs killed the 2600. It was ET and Pac Man, period. They were designed as games to pull the "casual" gamer onto the system. Outside of speaking upon fairly common knowledge, at that particular time when ET was developed Atari was on pretty shaky ground anyway. They'd been shuffled around different owners and Nolan Bushnell had already been ousted and was on his way building an empire around pizza and rats. Atari died because Atari was dead already. All the good designers and people that made atari a common name back then were gone, having formed Acclaim, Activision, or gone to develop for Midway, or work on other platforms.
So, when all the talents gone, and all your former talent is developing on other platforms, you're in bad shape.
If you want to draw a scary comparison, look at Atari then and Sony now. Atari was less than 12 months away from their new platform when the 2600 shit the bed. ET crapped and cost them a lot of money due to returns and refunds, and the corporate owners decided to shutter the development division for the time being. Killed the platform after years of domination because they failed to deliver what they promised.
Since then Sony's sitting in a much better position than Atari was, seeing as how Atari was a division, and although SCE is as well, it's still a larger corporate entity with more pull and money than Atari (in their division) had, so they can stand up for their mistake a lot longer. Sony will ride this out, for good or ill, and SCE will be taking a LOT of notes as to what to do at EOL for the PS3. I would suspect that a PS4 will probably have a lot more "innovation" built in to draw in the casual gamer, because HD media centers obviously don't have the draw that Sony thinks they do. Three platforms in, Sony hasn't figured out that multimedia isn't as big a necessity as they think it is. PSP, PSX (the big box, not the PSOne), and now the PS3 have all underperformed, considerably so, given the weaker or non-existent competition on all platforms.
dvddesign @ Dec 31st 2006 12:57AM
Oh, and Shagi, just to prove that there is some history behind this and that it's not all made up stuff or misquoted half truths...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari#The_1980s:_Hurdles_ahead
The part about Bushnell's departure's in the paragraph above the link.
nabisco @ Dec 31st 2006 1:01AM
Shagi, Shagi, I have no idea where you're getting the whole " The Wii oversimplifies it's games, IT'S DOOMED." thing. So it gets a few casual games for it, big deal. That's what Nintendo is trying to do, bring in non-gamers, but it isn't going to hurt anything. Nintendo still makes their flagship titles everybody wants and third parties will make games for the hardcore audience because they make their respective publishers money and if they're really good, it gives them recognition in the games industry. Those games will end up on the wii if the install base is large in comparison to its competitors.
One more thing, you contradict yourself by saying the wii controls are "broken" and "oversimplified".
Back on topic, I think that any discount is great. The ps3 costs a lot of money and making it easier to afford. I think a $100 Wii/$-20 DS/$-20 ps2/$250 Xbox 360 is good too.);
Shagi @ Dec 31st 2006 2:16PM
Its normal that there are 10 times the fools as logical people. How the fools get stars is beyond me.
Shagi @ Dec 31st 2006 2:49PM
I was just gonna leave it at my last comment beacuse I dont feel like writing a big response however leaving it at that would be crime so:
"but lay off the line about how a glut of crappy game designs killed the 2600. It was ET and Pac Man, period. They were designed as games to pull the "casual" gamer onto the system."
"Atari died because Atari was dead already. All the good designers and people that made atari a common name back then were gone, having formed Acclaim, Activision, or gone to develop for Midway, or work on other platforms."
1. Its not just that the atari died, its that the software market for the millions of 2600s already in homes dried up. It wasn't just atari who couldn't sell their first party titles anymore, every company was finding it hard to move their own software in a market flooded by a glut of bad games (not just 2 bad games as pointed out above). The overal quality of all the games released for the 2600 is what disenchanted and destroyed the market.
There are so many untruths and misguided thoughts in that sentence it really needs to be addressed.
1. 2 bad games don't confuse a market and kill a console, if that were true the video game market would have crashed again already cause each console has had at least 2 completely terrible and even unfinished games.
2. The 2600 was the first home console with interchangable games, at that point there was no market for a cartridge based system so everyone that bought the 2600 for their home was an unproven casual gamer market. I don't see how you could claim that hardcore gamers were primary owners of the system when hardcore gamers didnt even exist at that point. Hardcore gamers buy more games and complete them faster than casual gamers, this market was just being created by the 2600 so everyone at the release of the 2600 was casual, no one knew how many games people would buy.
"If you want to draw a scary comparison, look at Atari then and Sony now. Atari was less than 12 months away from their new platform when the 2600 shit the bed. ET crapped and cost them a lot of money due to returns and refunds, and the corporate owners decided to shutter the development division for the time being. Killed the platform after years of domination because they failed to deliver what they promised."
1. Again platforms and software were both not moving, bad software killed the 2600, that and the fact that no one was ready to spend a lot of money on a new video game platform when it drastically needed a graphical update to prove to consumers they wanted to upgrade. That sounds a lot more like problems the Wii has and it will only get worse the longer the Wii is out.
Mateo quoted me and called me an idiot: "Casual gamers dont drive the market beacuse they don't buy as many games as the hardcore gamers do." -Shaqi
Mateo you are arguing against the very definition of a casual gamer...casual gamers are people that only play games sometimes and dont buy that many games...that is the fundamental difference between casual and hardcore gamers...so you sir look like an idiot not me.
Shagi @ Dec 31st 2006 8:57PM
Yeah and one more thing, I am smarter then all of you
okay?
saggyShagi @ Dec 31st 2006 8:58PM
Shagi you're my hero
i want to blow you
dapoktan @ Apr 16th 2008 11:53PM
But the wii's dick is bigger than the ps3's dick!.. no wait.. was it the other way around?... or was it the 360? I'm pretty sure there's a point here, how could someone waste so many words about absolutely nothing?
nabisco @ Jan 1st 2007 1:46AM
Shagi, your time commenting here at Joystiq is giving me the assumption that you have yet to finish grade school. You are not smarter than us.
Do you want to know why you are the laughing stock of this website? It is because you are a moronic fanboy. Nintendo fanboys like diskoboy(-1 stars)got ate up the other day too so it's not just Sony fanboys like you, so don't go crying when you read something you don't like.
Second, your so called "facts" are nothing but wild assupmtions and you ignore true facts. There is no way you could translate what happened to the Atari 2600 to this generation. So why don't you do some research before you embarrass yourself again with another comment with a magnitude of stupidity as your previous ones, okay.
Shagi @ Jan 1st 2007 1:05PM
I fail to see how you cant compare the 2600 to the Wii...
granted you've got hardcore gamers around this time, but assuming hardcore gamers, besides the Nintendo fanboys avoid the Wii, it leaves casual gamers to support it. Thats almost exactly where the 2600 stood.
Its not an exact comparison but if you can see how hardore gamers might get tired of the offerings on the Wii (no meat) then certainly we can see how casual gamers might hold its fate in their hands.
Like I said previously, theres almost no hope for 3rd party titles on the Wii if that system ends up catering to casual gamers, and this could be disassterous for Nintendo and possibly a wider portion of the industry if it puts people off games all together.