Microsoft's latest round of price cuts for its Xbox 360 lineup of consoles was clearly designed to increase demand in time for the holiday season rush, and analysts like Wedbush Morgan Securities' Michael Pachter believe the company could stand to boost hardware sales by almost 20 percent over the previous year for the upcoming quarter, assuming all goes well. With regards to the competition, analysts feel the company who will likely feel the brunt of the new $200 USD sweet-spot pricing for the Xbox 360 (Arcade edition) is Sony, who still has the most expensive console on the market with the PlayStation 3.

However, Sony corporate communications contact Julie Han relates to Gamasutra that her company has yet to be quaking in it boots in light of the recent price cut announcement from Microsoft. Han also confirms that no further PS3 price cuts are planned for the rest for this year, a sentiment previously expressed by Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer himself.  According to Han:

"We're really confident that consumers are making choices driven by value, and we know PS3 offers that value across the board, with the built-in Blu-ray player the broadest and deepest software lineup in the industry, with LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, Motorstorm [Pacific Rift]... we're quite confident our holiday sales will be good.

"We try to stick to our strategy... we feel the PS3 offers the value at that price point. More than anything, you'll see with the 80-gigabyte announcement at E3 as well as with the recent 160 gig, consumers are telling you they want more storage for photos, music... new games are also getting quite a bit of pickup through PlayStation Network. There's also our new video download service that consumers are going to want to do. It's showing that we're moving in the right direction."

Sony again stresses that the PS3 features make it more future-proof than its competition, thus translating into additional value. To be sure, Han concedes there is still more work to be done on Sony's part in conveying these strengths to the average consumer, in addition to advertising console-exclusive advantages like networking with the PlayStation Portable handheld.