Mr Puggsly said:
PS2 and Wii are last time we had consoles around $99. The 2DS is cheap as well but that mostly a vehicle for selling Nintendo games and has very limited capabilities. Your argument is really MS should lower their price, but I don't believe MS or Sony are interested in a price war. Sony kept the PS1 and PS2 very competitively even while dominating. In theory they could grow their userbase further and hurt Xbox with a PS4 price cut, that's what old Sony would do. However, if there is a price war then both companies lose money, so we got a stalemate. I feel that's why 7th gen consoles stayed expensive. Ideally, the Xbox Lockhart should be powerful enough to phase out X1X. Keeping the X1S on the market only makes sense due to its potentially lower price. If Xbox X1S and Xbox Lockhart only have like a $50 disparity, then kill off the X1S quickly. |
We also had a $499 and $599 PS3 and then a $399 PS4.
I'm just saying the reason PS isn't lowering the price is mostly because they don't feel the need to, not that they can't. The fact that MS is doing so and by considerably less, with games included, means PS is selling enough and making enough, they see no reason to lower the price. However, PS knows they can't hold that price forever, and they also would like to keep making money on the hardware for as long as possible, so creating a PS4 SS makes sense. When sales finally start to drop off consistently, they will have a cheaper console to be able to drop the price and meet all of their targeted goals going forward.
PS isn't worried about a price war, if anything MS is, because when PS4 drops in price, it will likely lead to an XB1S(ADE) price drop, less sales, and less profits. MS is also indirectly influencing PS to drop PS4 prices by offering the SAD edition for $50 lower than the XB1S msrp, which is the same as PS4 now. Prices have to be dropped to continue momentum or to compete, and while PS is willing to give up a little bit before they budge, they won't let sales slip too far without doing anything about it. As for 7th gen, you have a point, considering how expensive PS3 was to manufacture. A price war would hurt PS then and MS wouldn't mind keeping their prices higher than they would otherwise, because it would mean more profit for a time. Until of course sales started to decline because that market had become saturated, so then prices would need to be dropped regardless.
That expensive manufacturing problem doesn't exist today due to the hardware used in both consoles this gen, so the only market factor holding the PS4 price up so high is PS4 sales momentum. When that momentum continues to slip as it has been, PS will eventually lower the price, new model or not. As long as companies see worthy potential growth, they will go after it, and $249 and $199 will no doubt lead to continued growth in sales for PS4 hardware, with lower profits for each one of those sales, yet higher profits overall at the end of the year. With PS5 likely a year away, PS isn't going to allow the momentum they've built up since 2013 to dwindle and hinder their next gen launch.
The problem I see with killing off the XB1S, is that all MS would have left is the SAD edition. That console requires decent internet, and the lower you have to drop the price to sell it, the less likely those buyers are to have worthy internet to use it. It's right back to Mattrick all over again. If you don't have good enough internet, then buy a 360. If you don't have good enough internet for the SAD edition, then buy a PS4 basically.
