PlayStation 5

Yeah, I’m pretty sure both will be at least $499 this time.

My worry would be more that with these newsleaks, they’re trying to condition the market to $550 or even $600. We’ll see - hopefully the magical $500 price point keeps them at $499 this time around.

I don’t know why that would be the case. Sony, at least, usually sells new consoles at a slight loss when they launch. If the reported cost is true, $550-600 would be a big mark up.

That $450 number is only the bill of materials. You’ve still got R&D, manufacturing, shipping, marketing, etc. At $499 they’d still be selling it at a small loss.

I agree that $550-600 is extremely unlikely, however.

Sure, but their bill of materials for the PS4 was estimated at $380 which translated to retail pricing of $399 with a small loss per unit. The PS5 coming in at 450 for parts right now I think would actually give them a bit of extra flexibility to bump up certain specs a bit if they are going to settle on retailing at 500. Like maybe they can bump the SSD size or pack in a nicer headset than they had planned on.

Should people really expect PS5 to cost the same as PS4 when there have been several years of inflation in the meantime?

Inflation is certainly a factor in price, but of course the price of components also fluctuates wildly over the years as methods and yields improve.

I mean, yes? $399 is still the right launch price, and both Sony and Microsoft know this. If they could charge $399 they would, but it’s sounding like their ambition has gotten ahead of them.

Games have been $60 for 20 years. If they followed inflation they’d be $100+. In fact, the prices for tons of things don’t track inflation - most tech products included. How much would a computer cost if inflation was a factor? $6k?

Give it a generation, Nvidia might make that a reality with the next RTX cards! :)

Yes it’s been years, but it’s not like competition is… weaker. There is a lot to do out there. They’re not just competing with each other anymore, and they haven’t been for years. They need those machines in homes to sell those games and get a solid market.

I don’t know what they’re going to sell it at, but it really boils down to what they care about most.

Smartphones keep raising in price. Video cards are as well. It just doesn’t really seem to be true that electronics are getting cheaper nowadays, I can’t imagine the next gen consoles are going to remain $399. I mean, that would be awesome, but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe we’ve reached peak tech product price reduction?

I guess so, but wasn’t the price of a console game in the PS2 era (which I guess was twenty years ago) $50? And that was a ten-dollar dip from the console generations before them, and some PC games in the 80s and 90s were seventy or eighty bucks. It’s not just an inflationary curve from back when hamburgers cost a nickel and games were two bits.

Also, game prices may but be going up but that’s why we have so many more DLCs. That’s the price increase in games.

Guys, it doesn’t matter. The higher cost of the PS5 is not because of inflation. Tech products and their components go down in cost over time, not up.

The cost increase is due to the components costing more than they did for the original PS5, because they are focusing on top performance this gen vs. keeping costs reasonable last gen. Simple.

But there have been memory chip shortages off and on for the past few years.

We had two generations where $300 was basically the accepted entry price, two where it was $400, so I think we’re about on schedule to see the entry price rise to $500.

Considering what most people pay for their phones (which they use for what, 2 years?) I think that $500 for a console that generally lasts about 7 years to be totally reasonable. Especially now that consoles have essentially reached graphical parity with PCs.

Yep I can totally see $500 consoles this fall.

Wait, what now? All that standing still has finally got them to the front?