-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
PS5 and Xbox Series speculation launch thread |OT9| - For flops sake!
- Thread starter Mecha Meister
- Start date
- Status
Hahaha, just think if this is how things are now then wtf will it be like in here when the full specs and design drop!
That's sort of the point I was trying to make. Just focusing on the cost of the console and building your entire strategy around just that figure is facile. There are more things at play here, especially now when subscription services and ecosystems are far more established.
The previous base console was also mired with bad messaging and an accessory not everyone wanted coupled with a competitor that came out with a more powerful console.
Great question. Theoretically I would first ask if I could have more success by flanking them than going head-on against them, while simultaneously shifting my business focus to services, subscriptions, and cloud.
I would also say the PlayStation analogy is more apples-to-apples than your Xbox one. The $500 play was with a less performing box and a bad bet on a mass-appeal device. Conversely, the $500 powerful box that just launched has been very successful vs. expectations and has done a lot to change the narrative around your brand.
So do you want to be Porsche or do you want to be Toyota? Both successful in their own right, targeting different audiences.
I've never suggested that the Xbox plan will beat the PlayStation plan. But it's possible (and Phil has said) maybe they are playing a different game, so to speak.
That's a good way of looking at it. Another way is that they built the most successful generation in their history by trusting the architecture to a single entity, Mark Cerny. On top of that, they made a last minute cost decision to double the RAM. I think they can be persuaded by technical arguments.
I was under the impression that eventual RRP is what you base the console design and strategy on. Obviously I agree with you on things like ecosystems and subscriptions.
A 2D measurements (pixel ratio) doesn't indicate how much a (3D) games weights on the GPU.
In your exemple, you do like if all ressources between 4 and 12 TF were only used for scalable effects.
But I could easily design a game for a 12TF GPU that couldn't run even at 720p on a 4TF GPU.
And I am also skeptical about a single portion of GPU sufficient to erase 200$ of the retail price.
Yeah, launching at $100 price premium with everyone talking about your graphical shortcomings is a lot different than launching with a $100 price premium while everyone is gawking at your bells and whistles. The PS3 launch, the Wii U launch, and the Xbox One launch show that the hardcore fans that justify those premiums to themselves dry up pretty quick.
The One X and Pro demonstrated there is definitely an audience for the high end as long as the cost/performance ratio is perceived as reasonable.
I won't dispute your reasoning, makes perfect sense. But then again you have Kenichiro Yoshida, the CEO of Sony Corp, saying that PS5 will be "a niche product", aimed at "hardcore gamers who obsess over the latest features".
Yeah, of course it's PR bullshit (if I want the latest features I would need a lot of money to build a hot new PC, he) but it's certainly not cheap console PR bullshit. And I know Jim Ryan spoke about the fastest transition blah, blah... It could mean a number of things besides price, things already discussed to death in this thread series.
Last edited:
Yeah but there is a balance between the two. It all depends on how much you are pusing to the screen :)
I think that's reasonable. I personally don't see Sony trying to chase a power crown that's ultimately meaningless.
This is a post that i'd like to remember when the official teraflop number gets revealed.
To believe PS5 is 36CUs is to believe MS somehow got 16-24 more CUs in their console for the same price ($499) 3 years later, but Sony couldn't squeeze any more in for the same price ($399) 4 years later.
I should note that one of them went on to selling 80 million which not bad sales looking at consoles number over the years .
It was just bad for them since they sell more usually .
I still think you could use a lot of those same arguments to claim that Sony should reasonably be shooting for a $500 price point too. The Playstation brand is seemingly extremely strong right now. I think they could pretty easily get away with charging $500 for a console without losing many people, especially if they come in at the same price as their competitor. I'm sure Sony hasn't missed how well the One X has rehabilitated MS's brand. Coming in at $100 lower against an MS machine not hamstrung by Kinect would inevitably mean significantly weaker hardware, and historically that hasn't been ground Sony has been willing to cede day and date. Lockhart might throw a bit of a wrench in things, but I still would really like to know how MS will position it before trying to figure out how it would affect things.
In one of his recent tweets, Zhuge explained what "fastest transition" meant. I think it has more to do with the services aspect than price. I'll have to look up the tweet.
To Yoshida, all PS customers are in that niche. He wasn't referring to what we here might consider 'hardcore gamers'. He was talking in very relative terms, next to the wider gaming industry covering mobile, social platform gaming etc. So whatever about anything else, I don't think his comment suggests Sony would be moving to a significantly more expensive product with the next PS or be angling after a smaller niche than the existing PS audience. (I don't think 449 or even 499 as a starting price would necessarily fall in that camp btw... but anything more probably would).
The thing nobody talks about in this scenario is that launch pricing is not really relevant. If they have a price forecast and they know they can get to 399$ after 2 years because the components are projected to get cheaper, then launching at a higher prices should not impact sales performance. The first 2 years are for early adopters, mass adoption comes later. They also could choose to subsidize the launch price to get to their desired pricepoint and make it up the difference with services, like a PS Plus Premium or whatever. There are too many variables and factors we don't know to just say they'll stick with 399$ because it worked in the past.
They could build a 600$ device having a very strong brand at the moment. In fact, they even tried it once. Ended badly.
It's not that they cannot, it's that they lack motivation to do so. Bigger price - less potential customers.
MS on the other hand already battle-tested 499$ pricepoint with the device that made miracles to their brand. Phil wants the power crown, because it gives him differentiator. Sony can just go back to their reputation of awesome first-party titles. They don't need that crown.
This is a fair counter-point, for sure. There are *also* good reasons Sony may be targeting a higher price and I think this is a logical thought process.
I would simply be surprised if they they thought this way. The volume difference of the Pro vs. the X would suggest the better bet is $399 than matching a TFLOPS battle. I assume that would be Sony's takeaway from what's happening in the market.
Of course Sony cares about performance. But do they care more about volume is the key question in my mind.
I have seen people saying people who expect higher then 9.2 to be setting themselves up for disappointment, That's how i view $399
His name isn't K. Lee.
Wait, he requested a perma ban? Not a temp one?
Does that theory have something to do with a bias towards one camp? If so, ;).
Leveraging streaming is another way to do that. People could buy a digital PS5 game and play it on their PS4 by streaming it which could keep the person in the ecosystem and allow them to upgrade to native hardware at a later date.
What do you think about Microsoft potentially launching both an Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S at the same time?
Ok, about that, and I will try to use very neutral words. I don't think people judge Mark Cerny right. X1/PS4 launch was a very once-in-a-lifetime thing, with MS betting all on 8GBs of RAM and failing when better dices became available. If you look what Cerny actually had in mind, it's 1.8TF 4GB GDDR5 RAM device. Nice - but nothing to write home about. Even final PS4 would be a disappointment(nobody was excited for a mid-range Radeon GPU power), but compared to Xbox(that screwed up on unrelated reasons, though I see them as just unlucky) it looked great.
8.5TF PS5 is exactly something like Cerny would build - powerful enough to bring new level of gaming, featureful enough to be interesting, cheap enough to be mass-market from the start.
It did not end badly .
If it did MS has never had a good consoles gen yet .
Maybe an early development kit using non final hardware.
Or the development kit is 40 full active CU at 2000Mhz max and that would be 10.24 TF
But that is not indicative of the consumer PS5.
And then again it's all just alleged second hand hand information from whoever.
Just leak target spec whitepapers and I'm fine.
All that is the definition of unsubstantial unlike all the other information that is out there.
And we know Ps5 development kits are out there. We have a ton of pictures of them. Yet nothing about the specs 9 months before launch.
Interesting points to consider. I'm not fully convinced yet, but I definitely understand the thought process behind the speculation about different price strategies a lot better now.
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
This is something I've been thinking about as well.
If Sony keeps the PS4 Pro around, do they drop it to $299 by the time PS5 comes out? I just can't see them offering the PS4 Pro at $199 -- a $200 drop from the PS4 Pro's current price of $399. It's possible, but I would consider it unlikely.
Why does that matter? Well, how do you expect to move PS4 Pros at $299 if the PS5 comes out at $399? There's not enough difference there. The PS5 would almost have to be $499 to coincide with the idea that it is a "premium" offering, as stated by Mark Cerny. The word "premium" insinuates that it is being compared to what came before it (the PS4 Pro).
Now, if you believe Sony will just discontinue the PS4 Pro and phase it out of retailers, then these points don't matter as much. But I admittedly don't know what the precedent is for phasing out a previous console when a new generation starts.
"Conversely, the $500 powerful box that just launched has been very successful vs. expectations and has done a lot to change the narrative around your brand." - and Sony could saw that and decided that they wouldn't allow for big performance difference nextgen ;)
True, but comparing hardware sales in North America in mid 2007 to whatever they became with the Slim, it's clear $599 was a real anchor.
I agree with all your points.
Except for :
If they drop their working strategy it´s not because their competition might target a bigger pricepoint.
If they go for this route it´s because they believe they can sell their product at a bigger pricepoint, because they think it´s better for their devs to have a more powerful machine, because they believe we may be looking into a longer gen cicle or any other reason that concern Sony themselves and only that.
I don´t think they will follow this route but if they do it won´t because MS did it and some forums users are raving about it you can be sure of that.
I feel like you're misunderstanding the conversation around price on the PS5.
It's not about what Sony (or MS for that matter) can "afford" in terms of production costs or losses on HW at launch. And it's not about whether Sony can sell more consoles than MS at a certain price point. Gaming is a huge percentage of Sony's overall business, and therefore the profitability of their gaming division dives a large part of the company's overall financial position (and therefore stock price, an item extremely important to decision-makers in the company).
At the end of the day, their decision-making goes like this: "If we build a box at a $500 price point, rather than a $400 price point, are we going to sell more consoles and drive more gaming revenue?" If the answer is "no" then it doesn't make sense to build a $500 box unless you think there are external strategic factors at play. Consider all the factors that are constantly raised in Sony's favor in the console wars threads:,
- Exclusive games are a key driver of platform choice, and Sony's first-party has been much more successful than MS over the past decade
- Xbox has barely any presence in most markets outside of US/UK
- Playstation brand loyalty / presence is so strong that just posting the PS5 logo on Twitter/Instagram drove incredible social media engagement
- By virtue of its market position, PS is able to obtain third-party exclusive deals much more cheaply than Xbox
(Alternatively, if you want to take the position that then they would just eat a $100 loss on each console, consider what that means. Assume that over the life of the console, that number becomes $50; because maybe they're eating $100 on the early consoles but that number decreases over the life of the console. If they sell 100 million consoles this generation, eating $50 per unit means $5 billion less profits. That doesn't make sense at all, when you could invest that money so many different ways.)
Does this mean it never makes sense for Sony to target the high end of the price range at launch? No. Maybe they've decided that VR is still poised to be the next big thing, and have decided that they need the specs of a $500 box to deliver on a next-gen VR experience with PSVR2 in 2022? Or maybe they think that by not ceding any performance high-ground to Xbox they can get MS out of the console business for good? Or maybe they feel like by beefing up the specs today, they may lose a certain number of sales early in the generation, but they'll be able to extend the PS5's life for a year or two more, which will be overall more profitable in the long-term?
This is what people are talking about when they question whether it makes sense for Sony to design their console at a $500 price point. For reasons discussed immediately above, that doesn't mean there's no way they'll do it. It just means that, on the face of things, there are extremely compelling business reasons to target a more modest price point.
I would think they care about the high spending early buyers which power is a factor .
Also if they care about volume so much then PS4 would have not been $299 after 5 years .
There is a line and i don't think $499 would be bad for the first year to get the high spenders .
The first two years are very important.
Maybe not for everyone, but they'll be crucial for Sony.
If the PS5 has a 'slow' start, it will instantly be labeled as a failure because it couldn't sell as fast as the previous console and the Switch (that's constantly being compared to the PS4, sales wise).
That's what selling over 100 million consoles does to you.
Exactly lol Sony's worst sales (home console) was Microsoft's best. X1X is doing ok, clearly not great or else they would have been touting numbers left and right about it. It moved the needle and that's about it (imho)
I don't know if we've ever actually seen the numbers on the volume difference between the two though, have we? (By "we" I mean people on this forum, not people that may have been privvy to those details ;) )
So... the unanswered questions are: does that mean that Pro was outselling XBX? By a little? By a lot? (I'm not actually asking you to answer them, more just stating them)
If we did have that information, then maybe we could speculate off of it. But I don't think we do.
- Status