How many extra consoles will GTA 6 sell?

[EricHiggin]

Shadow1980 said:

EricHiggin said:

Typical inflation or overprinting money inflation? Things aren't so expensive now because of typical inflation. Which also means when things settle back down eventually, everything will become a bit cheaper again. Now it won't go back to being as cheap as 2020, due to typical inflation, but unless SNY wants to repeat the 3rd console curse again and tank PS6 sales, they'll put together the best console they can for $499 and will sell that.

Increases in money supply do contribute to inflation, but they aren't the sole cause. Supply and demand dynamics are other contributors, and tariffs can have upwards pressure on prices. In any case, I doubt sticker prices in the aggregate are ever going back down, because they never go back down. When people say "We want prices to go down," what they're asking for is deflation, and we really, really don't want that. We run the risk of a deflationary spiral, which can be far more disastrous than a couple of years of higher-than-average inflation (see also the Great Depression). Even with the occasional bouts of deflation, in the long term the purchasing power of the dollar has always trended downward. There's a reason why you can buy cars for under $10k anymore, or a hamburger for 25 cents. There's a reason why $400 for a console was prohibitive 30 years ago but quite affordable today. There's a reason that $80 that Doc Brown owed Buford Tannen in 1885 was treated like a small fortune, because it was (over $2000 in today's money). None of that has nothing to do with something being "wrong" or "bad" in the economy. It's just a fact of life that a currency gets less valuable over time.

For video games specifically, I suppose it's possible that once all this trade war nonsense dies down console prices won't continue to increase, and we may see $80 games come down to $70, but I honestly doubt it. $70 and even $80 was a long time coming. Games weren't going to stay $60 forever, especially with ever increasing budgets.

Some things will drop in price, others won't. Console parts won't get back down to 2020 levels, so no, SNY nor the others will be able to make a $499 system for the same level of profits as they are now, unless they offer weaker performance while overpricing the hardware at launch. SNY and the others would also have to subsidize the systems even more at launch. Instead of PS5 losing $25 to $50, PS6 may very well lose $50 to $100. Which SNY can deal with, because those were the type of losses on PS5 Digital at launch.

There's another way to solve that problem, but you've got it backwards. It's not game and subscription prices that will go back down, it's hardware.

You raise game and sub prices to offset (future) hardware losses. Nin and MS have already fully made the move, while SNY has only raised sub pricing (in most places). I'd guess SNY is waiting to see how quickly inflation will settle with what Trump is doing in America, including tariffs, and if things can settle quick enough, they might leave the game pricing alone, at least until next gen maybe.

SNY was the first to raise game prices this gen, so they are likely being careful and don't really prefer to raise them again, at least until next gen if possible. SNY may also be thinking strategically against MS, because the quicker XB hardware winds down this gen, the more people SNY could possibly pull into the PS5 ecosystem now, potentially 'locking them in, or, locking them out of XB GP'.