Are there a huge number of people who decide which console to buy based on price? I buy Sony because I value their exclusives more and I like their controllers more and I’m already hooked into the PS+ ecosystem to the tune of hundreds of games. If price was everything, Apple would sell nothing. I don’t care if the PS5 costs $550 and the MS console costs $499. I’ll still buy the PS5.
Sure, we know that from the PS3/X360 generation. Sony came into that launch with a monstrous lead and squandered it entirely due to their pricing. The following generation MS made the same mistake.
I’m not price sensitive if we’re talking $50-$100 but I know a lot of others are. I’m okay spending a little more (it’s the cost of 1 or 2 games) if it means I’m going to have a better experience for the next few years. I’m a “hardcore gamer”, though. If I just wanted to chill out and play games every now and then, getting whichever one is cheaper would make a lot of sense.
Everybody has different price sensitivity, beyond a doubt. I don’t much care about price myself, but I do care about value. So if you have two consoles that are basically equivalent but one is $100 more than the other, screw that.
I can imagine many parents will decide if their kids get a MS or a Sony product, because they are the ones who have to actually pay for the damn thing. I’m sure this is a not insignificant factor in the initial push anyway…
Let’s put it this way:
There are about 120 million PS4s out there. Sony recently just sold 4 million copies of Last of Us 2, and that was their fastest-selling first-party title of this generation.
(EDIT: Just checked and God of War has sold about 10 million copies so far)
So exclusives are not the driving factor here.
It may be close, but I would say price is the #1 factor in purchase decision.
No, it had the biggest debut. Other games have sold much more over the lifetime though LotU2 may eclipse. Spider-Man is at about 13.2M units. Uncharted 4 at about 16M.
Thanks, yeah, I switched that to “fastest-selling.”
In any case, even at 16M units, which is great, if platform exclusives was the most important thing for buyers, you’d expect that number to be much higher.
For example, on Nintendo Switch, Mario Kart 8 has sold 25 million copies, and the top 20 selling games overall are Nintendo games.
And this is for a console with half the sales of the PS4 (57 million)
I think it’s safe to say that platform exclusives are, by far, the most important thing for Nintendo Switch buyers.
That’s very safe to say because the switch plays cross-platform games poorly and there aren’t many of them.
PS4 had a lot of good exclusives. There was no way I was playing them all. Many were in genres I did not care about, others I just did not have time for.
Separate from that, a lot of PS4 game playing happens on copies that are not bought new from the store. For example borrowed / second hand disks, PS plus, PS now. Gamstat has Uncharted 4 at having been played by 33M accounts, and their methodology seems very accurate. (Though 3rd party games such as Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, GTA V and Call of Duty are still the most popular ones).
I think this is an odd narrative take. The PS3 (Sony’s least selling system) ultimately sold more units than the X360 (Microsoft’s best selling system) did. Every Sony console has outsold every Microsoft console. Probably there were some lessons learned regarding launch prices and proprietary architecture, but it’s not like Sony squandered anything or has ever lost ground.
This isn’t really the thread for this discussion, but Nintendo dropping out of the traditional arms race was about more than just not being interested in fighting Sony and Microsoft on the same financial battlefield. They had actively had issues courting western third-parties for years and weren’t especially interested in purchasing external studios to bolster their internal teams, while Sony and Microsoft were much better at doing both of those things. Then the DS happened, and its success with casual players made it the second-most-successful dedicated game system of all time, behind only the PS2, which led them to the idea that they could push their upcoming home console to tap into that casual market in the same way. The Wii was successful on that front for several years, but (unlike the DS) lost ground with traditional gamers, and eventually that strategy cratered for all three console manufacturers when the casual market moved to Facebook and mobile games. After that, the Wii U wasn’t successful with anyone, which led to the current strategy with the Switch of doubling down on the core base and relying on the strength of marquee first-party titles, partnerships with companies like Koei Tecmo, and a heavy push for indie gaming. (They had started some of this with the Wii U, but that system had plenty of other issues that rendered any good ideas they may have had at the time moot.)
Yes, but it took many years for the PS3 to catch up to the 360. The story of that generation was “Sony’s console was a flop and got outsold by Microsoft’s offering, but Nintendo’s casual focus carried the market,” and by the time the PS3 finally edged out the 360 (note that the lifetime difference between the two is only a few million units), the only people who really would have cared were Sony fanboys who were too busy paying attention to the way the PS4 was completely destroying the Xbox One.
It’s been longer than that.
I was at Acclaim in 1999/2000. Nintendo came in and pitched Gamecube to us and basically said that they didn’t really care if we made games for it since they’d be profitable without a single third-party title.
It was pretty surprising to us at the time, since we were heavily supporting Nintendo 64. They just didn’t care, really.
It’s reportedly a completely unique chip and mobo.
They were losing nearly $300 per unit when the PS3 launched. The Cell cost wasn’t that big of a problem, it was very early in the production of Bluray drives, and the design included the full PS2 chipset.
The Xbox One S has been cheaper than a base PS4 for the vast majority of the generation. PS4 still massively outsold it.
That’s the point actually. A completely custom chip means they either have to over-spec the chip so they can bin lower to get higher yields, or they have to be more expensive because any chip that’s not close to perfect has to be thrown away.
Lockhart makes it so that any GPU chip that doesn’t totally meet the quality of the top tier can be binned down for the lower tier, thus making the overall economics less expensive and get higher yields.
No, I mean reportedly Series X and Lockhart use different chip designs completely. There is no binning happening to recover Series X chips for use in Lockhart. Both have redundancy built in, though. There are 56 physical CUs in the XSX GPU, for example, but only 52 are active to allow for defects.
Lockhart also uses a different memory bus and motherboard so there is actually a cost and complication in managing two distinct production lines and trying to anticipate relative demand.
Oh, well there goes that theory then nevermind!
IMO Series X and Lockhart being entirely different parts leans me to believe MS thinks Series X is going to be expensive, and that they’ll need a compatible, but much cheaper, alternative.
Meaning that the 360 essentially did better than the PS3 everywhere except Japan, which will not buy non-Japanese consoles.
