While consumers have been complaining about the cost of the PlayStation 3, developers have been complaining about the cost of working on Sony's next-gen platform. The development kit has never been cheap for the PS3 - good luck to smaller, independent teams - but things are changing. Sony has already dropped the retail price of the PS3 and now, they're halving the price of that development kit.

According to PR-Inside, Sony has slashed that very high cost in half, so the numbers now look like this for the PlayStation 3 development package- $10,250 in North America (it was $20k up until now), 950,000 yen ($8,600 USD) in Japan, and ยค7,500 ($11,250 USD) in Europe. Obviously, you'll still have to pony up a significant amount of cash to get your PS3 game project off the ground, but hey, $10k sounds a lot better than $20k, doesn't it? One of the biggest stumbling blocks a lot of teams face is the lack of start-up money for their vision, and when it comes to the PS3, that's an expensive proposition. But now that Sony has made this move, we should start seeing a lot more games hit the market, and from a larger variety of developers and publishers.

In addition, many analysts are predicting yet another hardware price drop some time early next year, perhaps in time for the anticipated blockbusters like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. So overall, the cost of the PS3, from developer to gamer, is definitely coming down.