VGKing on 14 October 2012
| Chandler said: Since you are throwing the restriction of profitability out of the window, sure, they could do it easily. But I don't think it would make a lot of potential Wii U customers rethink their purchase. You should know this, but the first 5 million buy the console regardless of price, games or competition. Kinda OT, but I believe that the "razor & blades" model will be Sony's demise. They are sitting on an audience that doesn't think it's a cool move from Sony to release a powerful console at an affordable price (read: heavy loss), they demand it. It's not a bullet point anymore, it's the bottom line. The r&b model barely works out for Sony now, but they recently have closed down some first party blades and next generation the third party blades could very well spread themselves thin on three consoles instead of only two. Sony will need another revenue stream to keep this model going and I think they are already transitioning into a "pay for online" model. Right now Sony is throwing a lot of games at people to buy into PS+ and ideally when they announce that online play will be incorporated into PS+ the outcry will be pretty small because most people already have subscribed. So from their perspective the status quo wouldn't change at all with this move. But in 3 years people will be paying for online play on PS4 and the amount of free games will be drastically reduced. |
Keep dreaming. Playstation Plus is and always will be, an optional premium service.
Basic online play is a huge selling point of the PS3 to this day, and it will give them an advantage going into next-gen. There is no "transition" into pay to play, if anything its the opposite with games like DC Universe Online and Dust 514. Both are free to download and play with microtransactions.
