Remember that E3 where Sony came out on stage with two guys and snarkily exchanged a physical game to highlight how "pro-consumer" Playstation was compared to Xbox (this was before Microsoft abandoned their planned DRM nonsense)? That event single-handedly sealed PS4's dominance. If Sony could somehow manage to keep their prices the same, or even lower them a smidge, they could easily run with the pro-consumer thing again and win the day. I mean, this is their big chance. Fate is once more winking at them from the corner of the room. Will they? Probably not. But if I were in their US marketing department, that is exactly what I'd be trying to get the top guys to go along with.

The defining moment of E3 2013 was the announcement of the PS4 price at $399, $100 cheaper than the less powerful Xbox One. The physical game exchange was merely adding insult to injury.

Today there's no such thing as a "big chance" anymore. The Xbox Series sold only 2.7m units in the USA in 2024 with the trend continuing to point downwards. Sony doesn't need to do any competitive marketing anymore, because Xbox is on its way out. And in light of this Xbox price announcement, Sony is very likely to follow suit and raise their PS5 prices in the USA for the first time. Xbox is so beaten that it doesn't even matter that Jim Ryan committed a huge blunder with his GaaS offensive that resulted in several cancellations and leaves the PS first party lineup crippled for a few years.

I disagree on it being pointless. I once asked Tom Kalinske what his recipe for success was. He told me that is comes down to two things: do what your competition can't do, or do what they aren't willing to do. And right now, Nintendo is either not willing to play the part they've been playing for a long, long time, which is the cheaper, pro-consumer option, or they can't. So If Playstation's president went live and said they are going to lower prices because unlike the competition, they believe it's all about the gamers... trust me. It would reverberate. Suddenly, you have Playstation looking like saviors and everything else looking like the crooks that the cynics have been claiming they were all along. 

It would work.

Work against who exactly?

The PS4-XB1 comparison only works because that was an actual competitive race with XBox quite possibly being favored to win going into that gen as it could be argued in the US especially the XBox 360 was more popular than the PS3. Today the XBox isn't competitive and on its way to being quite possibly even retired eventually. 

Sony has no direct competitor in that sense, all they would be doing is throwing away money by not following suit with industry standard pricing. And they already have done things like increased the price on the PS5 and brought a hugely expensive PS5 Pro to market, which tells you where their head is already at. 

Low profit margins is something no one's board of directors want to hear about, no one gives that much of a shit that some broke 10-13 year old can afford games (sorry to state it bluntly, but it's the truth). It's not 1995 or 1989 anymore. 

It's not even like Sony has a choice here, the majority of software sales on Playstation platforms aren't even their own games. It's 3rd party games and 3rd parties will follow suit with $80 games the first chance they get, so exactly how does Sony convince those pubs to sell for less on the Playstation? Are they willing to waive their $8-$10 licensing fee? No chance, their entire business model is reliant on collecting 3rd party licensing fee revenue. 

Other than the Genesis, does Kalinske have anything to show for his work in the console market?

Sony just raised the prices of the PS5 in Europe (and other parts of the world), now their cheapest option sells for €500 which is more expensive than Switch 2. There's absolutely no way that Sony will favor US prices even more than they have already done. Also, at this point I doubt that anyone is going to believe Sony if they said that it's all about the gamers. When it comes to subscription services, Sony's cheapest tier costs about 50% more than Nintendo's most expensive tier. Additionally, a PS5 plus a PS Portal costs significantly more than Switch 2 while offering a technologically inferior solution to what Switch 2 offers by doubling as a home console and a handheld console.

Besides, you are speaking from a very US-centric perspective, that's why you don't even realize that Nintendo is still the cheaper, pro-consumer option in the console market. Once Sony has increased the price of the digital-only PS5 to $450 in the USA, Sony's base model will cost as much as Nintendo's high-end Switch 2 model with the catch that Sony is selling 5-year-old hardware while Nintendo's system is brandnew.

The 90s game market is ages ago anyway, there's really not a lot to be gleaned from what Sega (or Nintendo) did like 35 years ago. Those days are over.

The industry (for worse and for better in different respects) is totally different now. Sega blitzed Nintendo with aggressive TV marketing riding tail winds of an MTV-tuned generation and a swing in teenage pop culture towards being hyper edge lords listening to Snoop Dogg/Dr.Dre/Nirvana/Green Day when they were all about New Kids On the Block and Milli Vanilli just 2-3 years prior (lol). Today that same generation doesn't even have cable TV and haven seen a music video maybe once in their life, lol, MTV barely exists as a brand. 

Kalinske was brilliant for his time, but that was his time, he's a He-Man toy exec that socked Nintendo in the gut using 90s culture. Full credit to him and Sega, they did what was borderline impossible (seemingly). A lot of what Sony gets credited for was really just taking what Sega was already doing. But it's not applicable to much today though. 

Most gamers at that time were also children, whereas today that's not the case even for Nintendo's fanbase (not even close). The 90s was a great time and the industry was arguably a lot more interesting back then, but as the late 80s/90s Roxette song goes ... "It must've been good, but it's over now". 

More to performance than the number of CU's.

The Xbox One's issue wasn't strictly due to CU's, but lack of DRAM bandwidth, texture mapping units, render output pipelines and other bottlenecks.

It's a culmination of issues that bring down a platform.

Price is the other factor, hard to justify buying an Xbox One when it was not only slower than the Playstation 4, but was also more expensive. (Eventually became the same price)
That SRAM was a cost-incurring exercise and the wrong choice.

And just like Flops, there is more to a system than just one individual number that people use for their specification-wars, take the RDNA4 parts for example...  48CU's will outperform the older 80CU part.

...On the other flipside a smaller chip that clocks higher isn't always a cheaper chip to manufacture, sometimes a larger chip with more relaxed frequency and voltage curves is a cheaper chip to produce, it's about finding that balance.
If you take a silicon wafer and a heap of chips suffer from significant crosstalk and leakage, then they need to be binned or sold as another product just as often as a larger chip with faults.

You know, I think you might have a point Rol. I don't think Sony will follow this. This looks like they are a company deliberately sabotaging themselves and a move to prevent more people coming in so they can wind down the Xbox brand.

While I do appreciate the technical input, I know there's more to it than just CU's and the PS5 is proof of that. The post I was replying to suggested that maybe the public won't care about the drop in power with the Switch 2 because the public didn't care about the drop in power with the PS5. I was just saying that, that's only because the drop in power couldn't be seen or felt, whereas in the PS4 and Xbone it absolutely could and look at the difference it made to the public perception of the Xbone. People cared a lot about power because they want to feel the piece of tech they are buying is advanced and cutting edge.

STOP SUPPORTING THESE GREEDY AF COMPANIES.

The gaming industry needs a crash and reset