Might Sony go with a two-SKU strategy next-gen (like Microsoft did with Series S)?

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Kyuu said:

Well I apologize for misquoting you but you said Microsoft's (Phil Spencer's) assumption made sense so it looked like you shared their opinion. I don't think their assumption/expectation ever made sense. They underestimated the appeal of a brand new $400-$500 powerful hardware and overestimated the Series S based on poor analogies.

Idk about the Series X, but the PS5 physical edition (which is slightly less powerful) made profit a few months into the generation... until the economical shifts complicated things. I still think PS5 will follow a fairly similar price drop trajectory to PS4 from here on out, with the Digital Edition eventually costing as little as $250-$300 (vs $200 for the much weaker Series S). I think a mass-porduced Series X with two configurations would have been the better strategy for the long term, even if it required slightly lowering the specs in favor of higher quantities.

When the PS5 revision launches later this year, I expect Sony to drop the price outside the US back to its original price or lower, and to start pushing the new "Digital Edition" (namely the PS5 without the disc drive add-on). It looks to me that hardware wise, Playstation's approach was the correct one. Hence copying Microsoft would be wrong imo.

No worries.  :)  I don't share all of Spencer's assumptions, no.  But I shared his perspective as an FYI.

It's impossible to know what to make of the PS5 (optical drive edition) being profitable after a year or so, because we don't know how much of a loss they were taking up-front.  It's a big difference if it goes from costing $525 to make down to $475, than if it goes from $600 to $400, for example.  We don't know enough to draw strong conclusions from that.

I remain curious why you think Microsoft made the wrong call, when this is the strongest start to a generation Microsoft has had yet.  Seems like the market is embracing their decision.  It's entirely possible that Sony and Microsoft *each* made the right call, as perhaps each of them made the right decision for their respective market segments and brands, in fact.  COVID was a double-edged sword, increasing demand but reducing supply, so I'm not sure it had a huge net effect.

As for long-term pricing, time will tell.  Perhaps in several years one of us can come back to this thread and comment.  However, I don't see why a PS5 slim would drop as low as $250, yet you think the Series S is only likely to drop down to $200?  Can you explain why such a small delta between them?

I'm skeptical of any PS5 variant dropping as low as $250.  Heck, the PS4 slim's MSRP is still $299.99, and it's been over 9 years.