I won't be paying less than $699 for my next playstation

I wouldn't count on inflation to guess the prices of the new consoles.

Just for reference, when in 2006 Nvidia launched their best cards, the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS, they were $599 and $449. In 2012, Nvidia's GTX680 and GTX670 were launched at $499 and $399.

$399 would be great, but I suspect it will be higher. *fingers crossed

so what are you going to do? your going to buy the premium PS4 for $499.99 and give the cashier an extra $200 just for the hell of it?

he'll write a check to Sony

Not really familiar with Nvidia cards. Much depends on the products so I would guess that GTX680 and GTX670 were't that big of a jump compared to 8800GTX and 8800GTS. 

The prices sound very much in line with what I suspect will happen in terms of the two.

I've mentioned before my prediction that Sony's next console will be modest, just a moderate power improvement over the Wii U, while MS's next console would be more powerful.

Remember, Sony's in a financially unstable situation. They can't afford to significantly take a hit with every system sold, and thus the cost to manufacture won't be too much higher than the system price. Assuming that Sony doesn't try to directly mimic the Wii U's main controller, and instead focuses more on Move and Eye, and assuming that the loss per console isn't noticeably bigger than Nintendo's, you can expect their system to be maybe twice the power of the Wii U, at most, likely with much of that going to the CPU relative to the Wii U.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is in a much more solid position, financially. At the same system price, they can afford to take a much larger loss per console - especially given that part of their motivation is to keep gaming on Windows. Their system, I expect, will be more powerful, perhaps 4x as powerful as Sony's, perhaps even more. I expect them to drop their interest in tablet integration with the 360, and shift it all onto the new console, where tablet integration will be one of the major selling points. While Kinect will likely be included, it will be made as cheaply as possible, I suspect, as MS will want to create as much parity with PCs as they can, and people aren't going to use Kinect with their PC as they would with their console. The result will be the ability of MS to focus a lot more of the money on raw power.


You will notice that the article was focused a lot more strongly on Microsoft - talking about Kinect, "Intel Chips in the case of Xbox", integration with Windows 8, etc. I think this is because they're judging a lot of what they expect about "next-gen" based on Microsoft. And I suspect that this is why Sony's just being assumed as "same as MS", when their financial position means that Sony cannot afford to risk 4 years of net annual loss from their gaming division as happened with the PS3.

$399 is the absolute upper limit for a successful launch. $299 or less is where you want for mass-market acceptance. I expect Sony to stick to that $399 having learned lessons from PS3. MS may try some subscription-based price, which will really piss me off. I hope it would piss off other customers too. Just like the $600 PS3, we can't let these companies take advantage of us. Sony using PS3 to push BluRay was exploiting gamers and was the reason I skipped a Sony system this gen. If MS tries to push subrcriptions to hide the price of its system that would be even worse. Gamers should reject it so it doesn't become the norm.

Let's take a look at the launch prices of their latest cards

8800 GTX_  $599  >>> GTX 280_ $650 >>> GTX 480_ $499  >>> GTX 580_ $499  >>> GTX 680_ $499

Do you know what happened from the GTX280 to the GTX480? AMD was competitive again and Nvidia was forced to lower their prices.

If Msoft or Sony weren't competing, I'd agree that the price would be higher, but since they are competing, they will try to lower their price as much as possible. That' swhy inflation is not relevant in this discussion.

I refuse to believe PS4 will launch first.