With the recent announcement of the super slim PS3 this week at TGS, Sony unveiled that the new model would not be receiving the mouth watering reduction in price that we all were expecting, shattering all hopes and dreams for those looking to obtain a snazzy looking PS3 with a price to match. When it was unveiled that nothing would be changing, some probably thought that the older slim models would probably get the reduction in price, considering it's an older model and all. Well, it isn't happening, folks.

Speaking with Engadget, SCEA Vice President of marketing, John Koller, said the reason for prices staying the same on the slim model is due to consumer demand.

When you look at some of the earlier chassis, and the really early adopters — the 20GB, and the 60GB — that consumer had a choice,” said Koller. “They could either go out and buy another hard drive — and it’s an easy install, so we make it easy for the consumer if they want to take a hard drive off the shelf and plug it in, they can do that. They had a choice of doing that, or purchasing another PlayStation 3. And what’s been happening is we’re seeing a lot of adoption of second consoles in-house.

The smaller Flash drive isn’t coming to North America, and a lot of that reason is the digital consumer. We really want to make sure, out of the box, that there is an option for them to be able to download that content. That is really critical for us, very very important.

There’s no price drop formally, but the thing that’s been happening in the market over the last year or so is that there’s been so many retail price promotions, and so many different gift card offers and all those things, being done by all of us (Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony), that we’ve heard from our consumer: ‘Enough with all these weird price moves. What we really want is content and games and value.

So, yea, folks -- nothing with the words "price" and "drop" in the same sentence will be coming out of Sony's mouth anytime soon. While Koller may be right about the whole games and content thing, I wouldn't mind seeing the PS3 prie drop just a tad. Then again, I still have my wonderful 60GB launch PS3 that plays PS2 games, so I'm certainly not in a rush to get my hands on any new model.