PS2 price cut to £199!

London, September 26th 2001

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, (SCEE) today announced its new sales and marketing programs for the coming season, the immediate impact of which will see the new street price of PlayStation®2 at £199, FF 1990, DM 599 and European and Australian and New Zealand equivalents on 28th September 2001.

Building upon the massive sales momentum of the past few months as stimulated by a raft of quality software launches, including SCEE's own Gran Turismo 3 A Spec, which has now shipped over one million units in all PAL territories, SCEE is well positioned to future capitalise upon the significant demand for PlayStation®2.

Outlining the marketing program, David Reeves, SVP Marketing and Sales for SCEE said, "Clearly a new price point of £199, DM 599, FF1990 will make PlayStation®2 much more accessible to the mass market, but it's not just about the price. In the run up to Christmas, we will see a wealth of outstanding games launched in support of PlayStation®2 including "This is Football 2002", "Wipeout Fusion'', "World Rally Championship'', "Airblade'', "Time Crisis 2" and "Jak and Daxterä'' plus many titles from independent publishers exclusive for some time to come to PlayStation®2 such as "Devil May Cryä " from Capcom, "Silent Hillä 2'' from Konami, "James Bond ..Agent under Fire" and "SSX Tricky" from Electronic Arts, "World Wrestling Federation Smackdown!: Just Bring It" from THQ, "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2" from Eidos and "Burnout'' from Acclaim.

Reeves went on to say "As we have received economies of scale in production, we have passed these on to the consumer during this year; our retail partners know this. From November last year, PlayStation 2 has sold at over three and one half times the rate of the original PlayStation over the same period of launch and we are now ready to make the move to these new price points.

To support such a massive launch program, we anticipate marketing spending in excess of Euros 140 million across the PAL territories over the next 4 months alone.

We are confident that coming out of Christmas, PlayStation 2 will be firmly established as the console of choice for all gamers for 2002 and beyond and that developers and publishers alike will further build upon their commitment to write exclusive quality titles for PlayStation 2."

Commenting on the upcoming activity, Chris Deering, President of SCEE said, ''Everything is now in place for PlayStation 2 to further capitalise upon its unrivalled market leadership. We have the quality games, an aggressive price point, the best developers in the world, manufacturing capacity and significant trade support.

110 PlayStation®2 software titles are now available, with over 90 more becoming available before Christmas.

In PAL territories there will be over 40 million PlayStations (PlayStation, PS one and PlayStation 2) by Christmas. All of them will be able to play the 1,238 PlayStation games available; PlayStation 2 will play all the 200 games available by Christmas and DVD movies.

This will be the largest and widest range of games of all time.

Commenting on the software programme, Phil Harrison SVP of development for SCEE said, "Never before have I seen such incredible support for a platform. Critics said PS2 was difficult to program for; yet here we are 10 months after launch with more than double the number of games for PS2 than we had at the same stage for PlayStation. We have Codemasters, Infogrames, Ubisoft and many other Eurobased publishers and developers, Konami, Capcom, NAMCO, Square from Japan and Electronic Arts, Disney, Activision and THQ from the USA all supporting PlayStation 2.

From Sony Computer Entertainment too, there has never been such a fantastic array of great games: "This Is Football 2002", "World Rally Championshipä", "Airblade", and "Wipeout Fusion". The trade and consumers must be licking their lips in anticipation."