Sony finally, finally seems to understand something: if you make your product cheaper, you will sell more of it. It may have taken them losing their “king of gaming” crown, losing exclusive titles left and right to Microsoft, their company market value falling behind the much smaller Nintendo in Japan, still getting outsold 6 to 1 by the Wii about 9 months after launch, but they are finally at the realization. Yes, starting next week the Playstation 3 will now be a more reasonable $499.

About 1 month-in, me and just about every analyst on the world gave Sony a simple fix to move more PS3s…needless to say they refused to listen and a ton of bad PR and multiple company firings later, here we are. I still don’t think the cut is big enough – I’d like to see a $200 cut to REALLY get back into this race, but getting a next-gen DVD player with a high performance video games system for $499 when the Xbox 360 Elite is $479 and doesn’t have the next-gen DVD player is a good deal.

Will it be enough to make a come back? Well it certainly can’t hurt, but Sony needs a big game to come out for the system as well – especially with Halo 3 coming in a few short months.

Congrats on holding out this long Sony. It really did you a lot of good.

[UPDATE 7/6]: Oh that silly lovable Sony. Today their President came out and said flatly that they had no plans to cut the PS3s price! That’s all well and good, except that numerous retailers have now had leaks confirming the price change.

Someone needs to inform Mr. Chubaci that we live in a world with a thing called the Internet. You can’t just deny something and assume people will believe you because you are the President of a company when there are multiple pieces of evidence to the contrary.

If Sony is just saying this to try a sell a few (and I do mean few) more consoles at $599 between now and next week when the $100 price cut goes into they are evil. I repeat to all: if you are planning on buying a PS3 soon, wait until next week.