So let me ask you what type of indicators let you believe the price point you just mentioned in your comment? And do yo expect a similar pricing strategy from both platform holders we talk about here?
Thank you for the kind words. It's just fun for me to be able to chime in with no risk of people thinking I'm shilling for someone. I've never actually been able to openly engage in a discussion around any of the other companies because of my role at Xbox. So it's fun to speculate and share some insights for a change. This may be the only console transition where I know enough to be helpful, but not enough to still have fun in the speculation.
I will say in every post first - I will never comment on the Xbox plans. I won't even hint. I'm careful in my word choice, so don't assume that anything I think Sony might do is trying to speculate as to what Xbox is going to do. With that out of the way...
I think Sony is going for $399 because it worked, pure and simple. It worked for base, it worked for Pro. Sony historically has not taken a huge leap in pricing - except once. I don't think Sony feels pressured by the X. I mean - I'm sure they don't like it. I'm sure they aren't pleased when DF comparisons favor the X. But if you look at sales it's not something they are probably overly focused on.
I look at it this way. You run Sony, and you are faced with two choices. One, you can build a very capable next-gen console with ~8tflops, Zen CPU, ~ 12-16gb of RAM and a 1tb SSD with PS4 back compat. It will be a bigger leap from Pro then Pro was from Base. It will have ~4.5x the GPU, ~4x the CPU, ~2x the RAM with much higher bandwidth, and I/O that's a generational leap in load times. I can do that at the same pricepoint that handed me 100m customers. Oh by the way you've had a mixed bag with BC in the past but you landed it this time.
OR
You can launch at the same price as the PS3 launched, in hopes of winning a horsepower battle with Microsoft that you have no way of knowing if they are even trying to fight.
It's just a no-brainier for me that Sony thinks $399 is the winning play. And I'm also in the minority thinking that it would be a pretty good box, and certainly a huge step-up from PS4 base which is the console owned by the bulk of my customers.
Now, the reason I get to chime in is that I don't know. This is what I base my assumption on, and it's been my assumption for many years. I stared with $399 and worked backwards to what could be built.
And I should also clarify that, historically, we've seen at least +/- 10% variability in final clocks even post announce. Near production silicon gives you an opportunity to play around with variables and if you remember the Xbox One launch they were able to increase the clock speed even after they announced specs. Same with Scorpio - that bring-up went really well and they discovered that there were a reasonable amount of SOC's that were stable at 6.6tflops so those went in devkits. Conversely PS3 had to disable one of the SPU's near announce because yields were a challenge.
So when I say ~8tflops, the reason I'm not making a firm stake in the ground is that if bring-up goes well, if Sony was targeting say 8.4tlfops, a 10% bump would get them to 9.2. Something like that is in the realm of possibility. Conversely, if they were targeting 10tflops, and were having yield issues, a 10% reduction would land them at 9tflops.
So you can see two completely different paths to 9tflops, and nobody outside the walls of Sony would know whether they exceeded their targets or missed them. All of these rumors of reported clock speeds don't have any idea of the nature of the test. Maybe they are testing the chip to see what the outer boundaries of failure are. I have no idea if the chip melted down shortly after running the benchmark. But I digress.
I think at $399 you're going to see something between the mid 8's and mid 9's. Nothing in that range would shock me. Anything in the 10's or higher would surprise me at $399. Above $399 there are a lot more things you can do.
