Remove those games and it is already effectively a $100 price drop. Drop the game that comes with these bundles and passing that $100 onto the consumer changes nothing for Sony. I'm not saying they WILL do this, I'm saying they've taken this route specifically to enable them to do it if they want.

I agree fully. It sounds crazy to think but genius at the same time. And you're right, most ppl probably aren't thinking about that possible scenario. 

Very good point gribble. 

The fool edition will become the genius edition lol

LOL. Only if Amazon start selling it themselves.

It costs SCE less than $50 to bundle a game with the base SKU.

It becomes a details oriented shaving of costs, but there's a cost savings involved by eliminating a retail/hard copy of the game and simply including a PSN download code.

There's a cost savings involved depending upon which game is being bundled. A new release like Star Wars Battlefront costs more than an older release like TLoU, which is even cheaper to SCE, being that it's not a third party release.

At any rate, cutting a PSN download code voucher doesn't knock $50 off the production cost of a PS4, so if SCE offered a core/base SKU at a $50 MSRP reduction, they would be losing more money, or perhaps more accurately, they would be cutting their small profit margin on every unit sold.

Of course if SCE wants to do that anyway so there aren't any $349 base/core SKUs cluttering up warehouses and stockrooms, it would be understandable although at this point, it's hardly necessary for them to try and saturate the market as much as possible given that they are already in a very comfortable position as far as unit sales rates go.

I can only speak as a potential second unit buyer, but my next PS4 will either be a special edition bundle, or a regular PSN voucher bundle when the reduced BoM redesign model hits retail in 2016.

While I wouldn't hesitate to buy another base SKU for $50 less, it feels like we're at this odd point where hardware manufacturers would much rather include a game voucher than cut MSRPs.

^^ Yeah. The sort of crappy thing about the new console gen is that die shrinks are now REALLY slow to come about, and are now so expensive that it takes a long time for midrange and lower parts to be shrunk. Making it worse is that Intel has the best process tech (by about a gen and a half), and TSMC, Samsung, GF are all behind the curve.

Whereas in previous gens we saw rapid (and widespread) reduction from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm to 45nm, this gen is really stuck in the mud.

28nm is what the Jaguar APUs started out as this time around, with 20nm planned. But 20nm has run into problems and delays, combined with very high costs.

GF even canceled 20nm bulk : http://wccftech.com/amd-cancelled-skybridge-glofo-terminated-20nm/

So, this hurts both MS and Sony in terms of getting better/slimmer consoles released. Improvements happen over time even with the same die lithography, but not nearly to the same degree as when you're able to cut a ton of heat/power with a solid die shrink.

Best guess : we see die-shrunk Jaguar APUs for the X1/PS4 arrive no sooner than Xmas 2016, and more likely sometime in 2017. And that will be the only revised APU during the entirety of the 8th gen. ~10nm will appear before 2020, but the economics won't support getting Jaguar on it.

I really hope it happends sooner than Xmas 2016.

16nm FinFET APU will make cooling needed be tiny compaired to what it is now, the power unit can be futher reduced down to almost nothing in size.

When that happends I wouldnt be surprised to see PS4/Xbox Ones being sold for 249-299$, depending on how smart they are about the design.

"TSMC's 16FF+ (FinFET Plus) technology can provide above 65 percent higher speed, around 2 times the density, or 70 percent less power than its 28HPM technology."  - TSMC

Half size chips has to cut price of the chips by a good bit.

The power consumption will probably be halved or something like that.

It should be enough to cut atleast 50$+ off of the consoles in terms of price (from the chip alone most likely).

Ontop of the extra saveings form the cooling unit, and power unit.

So do you guys think we'll see some crazy Black Friday deals this year for the PS4? Bundles going for $300? Even cheaper?

Might see some 329$ offers I think.