To put it in perspective: I am from Brazil and here, when the PS4 was released, it cost us around U$1000 to buy one officially, which is very, very steep, specially considering our minimal monthly wage at the the time would be around U$229. I bought mine only on February of last year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to afford one at it's U$399 price tag (since the price had been cut by then), which is still steep, as most people here still can't afford it.

A console at U$499 will have a surreal price here in Brazil, and I believe Sony would lose a lot of ground. Besides, there are other things to consider, like is it going to be advantageous for developers to invest more money to develop a high end game to sell it on a console that could potentially have a much smaller userbase, specially at launch?

I don't think you realize the irony in how much your statement mirrors 2 major marketing PR flops by Sony and Microsoft from recent memory:

Sony wants you to earn that PlayStation 3!

"During a recent interview with Japanese economic website Toyo Keizai, ever-charming Ken Kutaragi had this to say about Sony's goal for the PS3: "for consumers to think to themselves 'I will work more hours to buy one'. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else." In other words: Get a job!"

https://www.engadget.com/2005/07/06/sony-wants-you-to-earn-that-playstation-3/

Microsoft: No Internet? We have a product called the Xbox 360

"We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity," says Microsoft's Don Mattick, "it's called Xbox 360."

https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-no-internet-we-have-a-product-called-the-xbox-360/

It is not about being affordable or not and only a difference of $100.

It is a mental thing, people set a price what they think a gaming box is worth. Don't matter what you put in it, they won't buy it.

Now a dedicated gamer in general does not have those kind of stupid mental limitations because they know the value of the specs.

In this scenario we are talking general market. Your common casual gamers.

Compare this to mobile phones, some of them are what $600-1000 now? A lot of people upgrade them every new model release. They believe that the upgrade is justified.

In their head they probably thinking.

- I must have the latest for my social media posts

- Oh latest camera better pictures of my ass to put on Instagram, must have the best to get more followers.

- Oh i can listen to music whilst traveling

- Watch netflix or whatever

- Oh I guess i can still make calls

You can't compare consoles to other stuff. That's my main point. Of course inflation matters. But it's irrevelant when it comes to consoles and general gaming.

Consoles have almost one and only purpose, which is gaming, and peoples doesn't want to spend more than 400$ just for gaming, because the games are already expensive enough (+game as a service stuffs). If the minimum you can get is 500$ + 60$ for one and only (AAA) game, that's way too much.

Remember, it's only for gaming. Not other purposes. You can access Hulu, Netflix, Prime Video and stuff on other devices almost everyone own.

Why AAA games doesn't cost 80-100$ then ? Because publishers know people won't buy it

That's special pleading: Citing something as an exception to a generally excepted rule without justifying the exception.

If it were irrelevant to consoles, then nobody would have bought a PS4. The $400 sticker price isn't anything new:

But as I've stated on multiple occasions on this thread, $400 is reasonable today, but was outrageous 25-30 years ago, because inflation has gradually reduced the value of a dollar. Nintendo and Sega wouldn't have even attempted to sell their 8-bit or 16-bit systems for $300, much less $400 (that $200 launch price for the SNES is $372 in current dollars). By 2000, though, $300 was perfectly reasonable, and by 2013 $400 was affordable.

We can easily see that the $400 Saturn and especially $400 Neo-Geo actually cost a lot more than the $500 Xbox One X when adjusted for inflation. In fact, the One X is only marginally more expensive than the PS1 was at launch, the same as the 20GB 360 was. Meanwhile, the PS4's launch price makes it the least expensive PlayStation system ever at launch, and right at around the long term adjusted average for all consoles from the Big Four.

If inflation were really irrelevant for consoles, then $400 now would be just as unreasonable now as it would have been 20-30 years ago. Clearly it is no longer a deal-breaker. Consumers are still very cognizant of the declining value of a dollar over time. That applies just as much for consoles as it does for any other consumer electronic item or other good. A reasonable sticker price for anything today would have been considered too high when my parents were my age, and obscene when my grandparents were my age. And even in the shorter term, people notice.

Now, let's assume inflation remains relatively constant, with a net change of 3% from now to Nov. 2020. Let's further assume that the PS5 costs $450 and the rumored high-end "Scarlet" model of the Xbox 4 costs $500. This is what the price chart would look like (sans Neo-Geo):

A $450 launch price for next-gen consoles would be right on par with the adjusted prices of the PS4, PS2, and OXbox, and only $67/17.5% more expensive than the SNES. $500 would be only $50 more than that. Even $500 would be imminently reasonable for a non-Nintendo console. And the price will go down over time! By the 2022 holiday season, we ought to see standard prices no more than $400, and we'll see the usual big Black Friday deals that would knock $50-100 off the price. Within two years, consumers will be able to buy a PS5 or Xbox 4 for less than $400.

As for software, games did used to have sticker prices of $70 on occasion back in the 90s. The various versions of Street Fighter II and many JRPGs had that price point. And when you adjust for inflation, even the more common price points that where in the $50-60 range would be $80-100 or more now:

Software has gotten a lot cheaper, despite the growing costs of development. Even if you ignore the higher costs of cartridges, we can see that disc-based games have gotten cheaper. While none are on the chart, Sega CD and TurboGrafx-CD games retailed for $50-60 in 1993 ($88-106 in current dollars), thus putting them on par with the cartridge-based titles of the time. PS1 and Dreamcast games have adjusted prices well north of $70. Even $50 PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and earlier Wii games are more expensive than $60 games now. But instead of a price hike to $70, we've seen increasingly aggressive monetization schemes in games, where DLC has mutated from substantial chunks of content to modern microtransactions.

Oh, and you don't have to buy games at the full $60, either. You can go on Amazon right now and buy some of the biggest hits of 2018 for less than $40 already, in new condition. If you're willing to wait, most games go down in price quite a bit. It typically took a lot longer to see declines that sharp back when I was a kid, and even the reduced prices were still comparable to a brand new title today. Even by 1993, when the NES was already well on the way out, Nintendo's budget "Classic Series" line of games were not significantly cheaper than current games. In the spring of 1993, the original Metroid was still going for $30, which is about $53 adjusted.

Buying games is quite simply a lot easier on the wallet than it used to be. The laws of economics have quite honestly spoiled us rotten. And while it doesn't excuse what many AAA publishers have done in regards to monetization in recent years, it does explain it.

History has shown this to be correct repeatedly.  Base SKUs over $400 struggle every time.  And, while inflation is a thing, it simply hasn't been a factor in gaming.  In many respects, this hobby costs less than it ever has.  So, I see no reason to believe that $499 will magically work better this time.

These alone would probably cost about 10$ in production... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So yeah, the games were more expensive, but you got much more with them. Might want to compare the price of the games back then with the special editions today, and then you'll see the price didn't really drop all that much.

AFAIK both the X360's and the PS3's more expensive models sold better than their cheaper counterparts, though.

For about 2 years Wii were sold much higher than MSRP.

And also you haven't seem the good posts regarding inflation and console price.. PS1 at 299 in 1994 is more expensive than PS5 at 499 in 2020.

I don't know how much above MSRP it was selling for, but I doubt Wii was selling higher than $400.

And yeah, I'm aware of inflation. When I use the numbers to show the history of launch prices, I am aware that 299 in 1994 means something completely different than the same price today. However, just like box office, people still seem to compare them as if they're the same (Gone with the Wind sold many times more tickets than Avatar but Avatar is number 1). I believe these launch prices stay with the consumer despite inflation. They've stayed with me since being a kid and buying consoles, but that's just my experience.

Also, $299 may be well above what we're paying for in terms of value at its time, but things like manufacturing costs, adoption rate of consoles, etc. go into why we were willing to spend more.

I personally would pay $500 for something with a little more beef under the hood, but I think pricing determines which console maker sells more so I don't think it'd be in Sony's best interest.

People may make bad comparisons and ignore inflation in some situations.

But when purchasing people don't go straight for comparison of previous system plus inflation, they compare to other items they are buying at that period.

That is why NES @100, SNES @ 200, PS1 @299, PS4 @ 399 and PS5 @499 could be considered reasonable prices at the time they launched even if PS4 is 4 time more expensive than NES.

It's pretty interesting to see this thread just shortly after seeing a discussion (elsewhere) where people were seriously almost demanding and defending a $700 launch price.

It's pretty interesting to see this thread just shortly after seeing a discussion (elsewhere) where people were seriously almost demanding and defending a $700 launch price.