fast in making this thing. It's a pretty consumer-friendly move, Pachter said. Sony's move comes two days before the start of the video game industry's annual E3 trade show in Santa Monica, California, where some expect Microsoft to respond with its first price cuts on the Xbox 360. Nintendo, whose Wii is selling so well that it is still hard to find in stores eight months after its launch, is not expected to budge on pricing. The Xbox 360 and Wii have outsold the PS3 by several times in the crucial U.S. market, leaving Sony, whose PlayStation 2 dominated the last console generation, in the unfamiliar position of playing catch up. Sony is counting on the price cut to help it significantly grow sales of the PS3 ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season that accounts for most of the annual sales of highly profitable gaming software. Sony is also introducing a new version of the PS3 featuring an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a copy of Motorstorm, an off-road racing game that has already sold a million copies. The new model will sell for $600 and is aimed at gamers who expect to download a lot of games and other content from Sony's burgeoning online network. Sony also hopes the PS3 will win some converts following Microsoft's admission last week that the failure rate of its Xbox 360 console had been unacceptably high, forcing it to book $1 billion in repair costs. We 're