KBG29 said:
The whole point of Pro being $999.99 would be to specifically aim it at the Enthusiast gamers. You put it out of the relm of reasonable, to the point where the 90% won't even consider it. Just like people are fine buying a $2,000 4K HDR TV when there are $10,000 models available, most gamers would be perfectly happy buying the base PS5 for $499.99, and letting the enthusiasts dump their money into the $999.99 model. When you are talking about the Enthusiast level consumer, they don't care about every peice of content delivering the best that their product can offer. This is often the case in Audio and Video, it takes years before even half the content starts to take advanatage of new tech. At the end of the day the Enthusiast PlayStation Gamer, will be perfectly happy with all SIEWWS games pushing the Pro to its max, with a small portion of 3rd party titles utilizing the power of the system. Something like a $399.99/$599.99 Base/Pro makes little sense. The Pro should be a truly Premium Product aimed at the Enthusiast Console Gamer. It shouldn't be a half baked effort with the Pro name slapped on it like we saw with the current PS4 Pro. Sony has been offering Enthusiast level products in every other catagory of products they produce. It is time that their most popular, and most profitable products offer the fan base a true enthusiast level piece of tech. |
This would be horrible marketing for the Playstation brand, particularly at launch. Maybe they could try this sort of thing once PS5 establishes itself but otherwise its launch will be met with hysteria surrounding the $999 version which would dominate the mind of consumers even if there is a cheaper option. Since the vast majority of people would only consider the cheaper option, the preimum at launch would also create a sense of discontent in consumers who feel like there're missing something. Better to just market the base system as the cutting edge technology of 2020 and everyone is happy. The console business cannot directly be compared to sonys other product, sony are selling dozens of TVs per year, consumers understand how differentiation works there, its expected. In the console space they're selling one or 2 core products for which branding has to be managed very delicately.
What microsoft done with the Xbox One X is essentially the right way to go about things. A $999 system would probably never make business sense because developers aren't going to utilise those specs beyond bumping up a few features and consumers have limited options in terms of peak resolution and performance. Essentially 4k/60fps is upper limits of what people care about, beyond that you're delving into niches that is not worth Sony's investment. They could pour that money into almost anything else and it would probably generate bigger returns.
A system optimised around ray tracing could make for a great premium device but doing that right means waiting for effective hardware solutions, otherwise sony releases a $999 system to support raytracing at 4k and then 3 years later GPU's are doing twice a better job at half the price.
