Zippy6 said:
I said this recently in another thread. The $599 was not because of cockiness though. Every PS3 was sold at a huge loss and they lost billions. They didn't charge $599 because they were cocky, if they charged less they would have literally died. It was just a terribly designed piece of hardware. Cell and Bluray were both mistakes for a 2006 console. I won't deny that some of their statements you mentioned were horrible, but I don't think the PS3 era is any evidence at all that a dominant PlayStation will overcharge consumers and I think the "Sony has no competition! Price will go up and be insane!" comments are silly. They undercharged with the PS3, they just shouldn't have designed something so expensive. |
I would make the argument that they only designed PS3 which such high specs that they needed to charge $500 and $600 at launch, because they were arrogant enough to believe that their fans would buy the console at those prices. They could have designed a cheaper console with specs just over Xbox 360 and sold it for the same $400 that 360 launched for 1 year earlier, but instead they went with specs that were very expensive (and ultimately harder to develop for, so most developers never made use of those higher specs), all because they believed their fans would be willing to pay $500-600 for those specs. Ken Kutaragi's "the PS3 is for consumers who think to themselves 'I will work more hours to buy one' "basically confirms that Sony thought their customers should be willing to work more hours just to pay for such a high end console.
With Xbox essentially out of their way now in terms of hardware at least, maybe Sony will go back to that same way of thinking again. Maybe they won't though, we'll just have to wait and see. At the very least Gamepass should be able to keep them in check in terms of service pricing as long as Xbox doesn't go jacking up Gamepass prices thanks to Activision games being added (which may not even happen with CoD if some of these leaks are to be believed), and maybe Xbox can even manage to set the tone for next gen of staying at $70 game pricing (though they probably want to go up to $80 as well honestly, as do most of the game publishers I'm sure).
