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thismeintiel on 19 April 2014
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vivster said:
Max King of the Wild said:
vivster said:

I'm not saying Halo will be the equalizer. As I said I'm expecting some other bombshells( massive pricecut, unexpected exclusives, killer apps, major screwups from Sony...)  between now and Halo that will get customers running for X1s. With Halo being the pinnacle because no exclusive game will push as many X1s as Halo will do. So if all of MS's strategies fail and Halo won't move enough consoles then I will scream victory for the PS4.(


Sony can easily price match unless MS really wants their investors to make some noise. Esram in XB1 offsets some cost DDR5 has over GDDR3. DDR5 will probably become cheaper faster. Especially since Ps4 is selling at a much faster rate than XB1. This means that estimated costs at the begining of the gen (when sony expect 5mil) are outdated and in fact cheaper to produce. If not cheaper to produce than no doubt the extra game and accessory sales would off set the losses. It is complete wishful thinking that MS can drop the price but Sony wouldnt be able to. The way I see that panning out is MS reacting by cutting the price. Sony sits and waits to see it's effect. If it has a minor effect Sony holds on price. If it cuts into sales more than Sony wants they ride out the holidays at the higher price to grab more sales at the higher price and probably wait to cut the cost next FY so it doesn't effect their financials and sustains sales during the slower time.

That tackles only one of my concerns and isn't even that clear cut. I don't think Sony can afford an unplanned pricecut of even $50. Even if the cost of producing the console drop they were still calculating with the original price, which means at 5 million sold consoles that would make a 250 million dent in the forecast for just one division of Sony. I don't think Sony is in a position to throw away money. They are not losing the war and they will not go to great lengths if a competitor is just catching up.

For me, a lot of concerns were addressed in March.  MS threw everything they had at Sony, but still lost.  Releasing their most hyped game for the year.  Check.  The game bundled free with the console.  Check.  $50 dollar (unofficial) pricecut around the time of the game's launch.  Check.  Massive ad campaign to push the game and console.  Check.  All this amounted to was a lower sales average per week than last month and Sony still being comfortably ahead.  And if what BenV was saying is true, then April is not going to be pretty for MS, either. 

Truthfully, what MS NEEDS to do if they want to win (maybe even just tie) the US is drop Kinect and drop the price to $349.  Of course, MS isn't going to be this drastic, otherwise investors will be livid.  That and they would have millions of Kinects just lying around with no one buying them.  The most I see is the current SKU dropping to $449 officially.  But, we have already seen that that won't do much.