MS will be the largest game publisher one way or another, whether they have some foothold as a 1st party or not doesn't matter. If they want $80 games, then they'll have $80 games, be it on whatever platform. I doubt they're going to sell Call of Duty for $10 less on the Playstation, ain't happening, you're going to get the same price across the board on all platforms.

Sony will have $80 games, it's just inevitable. 

You cannot increase the production cost of games by 30-50%+ every generation and expect pricing to stay the same forever. 

I get the feeling that most publishers/developers will dial back on graphics and insane production costs and aim for higher output and profit margins. The costs and time invested just aren't worth it anymore.

Advanced techs like RayTracing and Nanite are computationally expensive, but they should eventually reduce development costs and time. AI (as much as people hate it) will no doubt also be utilized to reduce costs/time. Some Playstation 6 (and comparable hardware) exclusives could theoretically be much more cost-effective than well optimized multiplatform games that target a very wide spectrum of hardware specs.

There really is no need to price these games that high. Only a fraction of them will cost $200 million+ to make, which still only require just over 4 million copies sold to break even (per Sony/Nintendo's previous pricing).

I get that.

There ARE going to be people who care about the drop of power with the Switch 2.
And there are going to be people don't care about the drop of power with the Switch 2.
And there are going to be people who care about the drop of power from the Playstation 5 Pro to Playstation 5.

We are all different people with different tastes, goals and expectations... And that is why all these devices that target different performance tiers and pricing exist, because we all like different things.

The drop of power between the Series S and Playstation 5 is arguably a larger gulf than what we saw with the Xbox One and Playstation 4.
The extra speed of the PS5's SSD basically was non-existent advantage, just like the Xbox Series X larger SoC is a non-existent advantage, they are for all intents, basically the same consoles.

I was just wondering recently if that super fast SSD choice was a total waste of money on Sony's part. All of the PS5 games that get ported to PC can run perfectly fine on a cheap and slow (relatively to ps5) SSD. 

Hmm, Idk about that. I seen a lotta whining about Spiderman 2 and Rachet and Clank Rift Apart. 

I'd love that, but Sony probably won't be that pro-consumer.

PS5 is already massively successful still and Xbox isn't much of a threat in the hardware and software space (more in services).

Sony is surely willing to raise prices again given in most countries PS5 has already had price increases before. 

Sony is probably thinking, we'll still outsell Xbox greatly if we're both expensive, not let's undercut Xbox in price. 

Digital foundry tested rift apart on a standard SSD and it was fine. The fast travel ability in Spiderman 2 is the only thing i can think of that might need that SSD speed. I forgot about that feature. Digital foundry never tested that on slower SSD

I'm enjoying the SSD speed a lot in GT7. Big game changer between loading a track for 90 seconds and just a couple, especially in VR. Of course that's comparing between GT7 on PS4 and PS5, but I doubt my slower SSD in my laptop can load anything that fast.

I rarely have to wait for anything to load in VR. It's nice for flat gaming as well, starting a game feels snappy.

Maybe it's overkill, maybe not. Still cheaper to upgrade than XBox anyway.
Prices here atm for XBox: 512 GB CAD 120, 1Tb CAD 195, 2Tb CAD 642.
Compatible 2Tb SSD for PS5: Lexar 1Tb CAD 90, 2Tb CAD 180

So nah, it's fine. Cheaper and faster...

PC tends to be a rich memory environment, so the need for the fastest SSD's are significantly lessened as there is a lot less reliance on streaming in general, Spider Man 2 does take a pretty hefty performance hit if you only have 8GB of VRAM buffer.

However the biggest advantage SSD's brought over spinning rust media is actually access times... We are talking 20x-40x improvements or more compared to old SATA hard drives.

I do have a test PC and Spiderman 2 and Rachet and Clank work fine on the SATA SSD which tops out at around 600MB/s.

Your mind will get blown if you ever get the opportunity to use a RAM drive.

Yeah Xbox SSD upgrades are bullshit, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by taking a propriety approach... Sony learned the hard way a long time ago that it isn't pro-consumer.

Not a total waste since it can have even faster loading times than the Xbox Series but it was definitely very overhyped since those are already so low on even a modest NVME and the game design and gameplay benefits from moving past hard drives haven't needed speed beyond SATA level so far.

Though perhaps it'll make more of a difference down the line since even now some games need to run on the slow hard drives in the last gen consoles and unless something is PS5 and PC only and requires an SSD at least that fast in the PC a game won't be fully taking advantage of that speed and developers won't wanna cut off that many gamers from playing their games so maybe a few years from now certain games that are PS5/PS6/PC only will start requiring faster SSDs.

Sony should for sure not go as hard with the SSD in the PS6 though, better to stick with a mid-range one than go high end considering how little the PS5 has benefited from doing that so far.