"I was disappointed not to see any sort of aggressive price cutting," Kotick said. "Of all the things that the hardware companies need to be doing right now, it's recognizing the difficulties of the economy and pricing their hardware appropriately."

Kotick joins GameStop Corp.'s Daniel DeMatteo, head of the world's largest video-game retailer, in saying prices are too expensive to attract consumers during the global economic slump. Worldwide shipments of game consoles and handheld players will probably fall more than 7 percent in the year ending March 2010, the first annual drop in six years, according to UBS AG.

"As the macro economy gets worse this year compared to last year, it's hard to boost sales of game consoles without a price cut," Eric Lee, a Tokyo-based analyst for Barclays Capital said by telephone today. "Expectation for an announcement of price cuts had risen before the E3 show."