This may sound strange, but I respect that Sony shuts up and takes the heat a lot more than the alternative. Whether it's Twitter analysts or "experts" or two-faced business people or extreme fans - all that warring is tiresome over time and just negative as hell. It's also very transparent, especially when corporate types engage in it. I can sort of see why certain people do it (eg. analysts) - console war rhetoric drives engagement which allows more exposure and may lead to more income opportunities. It's still intellectually dishonest, though, and disappointing.
Really, it's how companies should do things IMO. I think there's this weird idea among a lot of people that companies should now be our friends. Now, companies should definitely try not screwing over their customers, and should try doing right by people no matter what, but that doesn't mean they should be our pals. They're running a business, I want these people to focus their attention on the product and the business, don't worry about making me feel like I'm your friend when we both know you just want my money
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I guess I can see your point WRT analysts engaging in this type of toxicity, though I also think it makes them look less professional and might hurt their reputation if they decide to move to a similar position in a different industry, where this kind of stuff isn't tolerated. But what we see from those types in gaming, the same thing's been happening in other entertainment spaces too, sadly.
Part of the reason being, there are enough people in the community who actively want it, thrive off it, and love the drama.
I prefer a more analytical approach and so appreciate your reasoning on why Sony increased the price. Thank you for that. It's very interesting to delve into the why and how of a situation as opposed to going straight to outrage and gotcha! bullshit.
No problem. Like I said before I was kind of in disbelief this was announced, not the kind of announcement you'd expect to close the week out with. And in the past, Sony have always balanced out bad news with good news, but that didn't happen this time. There was no new game announcement or look into GOW Ragnarok gameplay, for example, to awe people and knock away a lot of the bad reception the price increase announcement got.
That's kind of why it felt a lot like when MS announced the Gold increase, or the Starfield & RedFall delays, where in the latter case at least I think they also should've balanced it out with some good news. I expect that lack of balance from Microsoft though, not Sony, so that threw me off. However just taking a little bit of time to think it over, and see what other calm minds were saying, helped to see the bigger picture.
As much as it might suck there's a price increase, I can understand why it's being done when looking at the unique position of Sony as a company in particular. Really don't understand when people say they should just do things like Microsoft or Nintendo, those companies have way different financial structures and revenue/profit outlets that can offset gaming hardware losses. These companies aren't interchangeable.
Sleepy Brown's got more than a few screws loose. I think he's a vet from the Great Console War of 2013 and might be struggling with PTSD.
I don't see it as scared or weak at all. I see it as a 2 trillion dollar company taking advantage of being well, a 2 trillion dollar company. Microsoft and Xbox are the underdogs and when you're the underdog, you need to be far more aggressive in order to make an impact. Perhaps it could be seen as price fixing but at the same time, Sony is a billion dollar company and can easily absorb the losses if they wanted to but they simply don't want to and prefer to pass it on to their fanbase because they know their fanbase will accept with little to no issue.
MS and Xbox are not underdogs. I don't know how that narrative took hold, but it's not true. MS may be 3rd in console revenue but they're literally within spitting distance of a billion or two of outpacing Nintendo in annual gaming revenue, and will in fact be doing so once the ABK deal is finalized. How did they get there? By buying ABK for $69 billion, a move only a company as comfortable in market valuation and annual profits as Microsoft could pull off.
When I think of actual underdogs in the console space, I think of companies like (90s) Atari and Sega. Companies that would've always struggled against more well-funded rivals no matter how good of business moves they made, simply because they could never pull in enough profit off big enough revenue to sustain increasing costs of operations. Microsoft as a company haven't been an underdog since the early 1980s.
I don't think a company that can buy its way to being the top revenue earner in the industry is an underdog. I don't think a console brand that has been able to survive a series of mistakes that would've been game-ending catastrophic for brands under much smaller companies, can be called an underdog. IMO.
How could they look greedy if they're losing more money by lowering their consoles by $100 each?
Because it's an aggressive push to gain marketshare by pricing at a point they know would probably bleed out their nearest competitors if they tried a similar strategy, and provide a product in a market that is starkly lower than the trend of electronics creeping up in price due to inflation.
Combined with concerns already expressed by the FTC and DOJ over MS leveraging their wealth as a company in certain sectors to offset losses they can tank in other business areas (and basically bleed competitors in those other business markets, like gaming, out of competition through such tactics), not to mention using their money to buy marketshare advantage in a way which could be ruled wholly unique to them and thus monopolistic, and it's a recipe for disaster.
As for ABK, I know a lot of people want to believe that there will be some kind of concessions or some shit but there won't be and even if there is, it won't be gaming related. It will be cloud/package/bundle related which has more to do in other countries and regions than the U.S. Even if the FTC tried to place concessions on the ABK deal going through, Microsoft doesn't have to agree to it and could sue them instead. My personal thinking is that the deal goes through with no issues or concessions unless it's tied to what I said and is more for other regions than the U.S. anyway. I'm also expecting the deal to close in early-mid November.
Yes, MS could sue. And they could then lose that lawsuit. Moreover, if they contest too much, it could make acquisitions with future gaming companies very difficult.
Not because anything would be legally stopping MS, but because some of these other companies actually have people at the top who would see that type of corporate behavior and culture, and not feel it best for their company to be brought in under it. Japanese developers and publishers in particular, I feel, would hold this notion the strongest.
They may see MS suing in the case of wanting to bark back against concessions by the FTC as being greedy, and depending on the concessions being challenged, could conflict with plans those devs and pubs would have themselves under an acquisition.
Weakening PS5 sales could be a direct result of Sony not having enough stock and shipments everywhere. Because of the massive chip shortages that's still expected to exist in 2023, this doesn't really apply because first, it affects both and second, Microsoft putting their consoles on sale by $100 each doesn't mean anything if they don't have to sell to consumers in the first place.
But PS5 supply has actually improved lately and rumors from Japan put it that a new model is set to hit the market in September that will probably be using the 6nm process.
If MS don't have any units to sell in the holidays due to supply constraints, why would they lower the price by $100, then? It wouldn't be like they have an excess of systems in the distribution channels to shift through, so are you saying that even what number of systems they'd have, they could not move at current prices and would need to lower in a promotion by $100 to sell them? I don't think that is the case.
Most product sales are a result of consumer demand. Microsoft may be taking advantage of the situation but at the same time, no one is forcing Sony to raise the price of the PS5 and if they wanted to, could have just stayed as is and eat the loss. It's not like Sony is broke. They're still a billion dollar company who has dominated for decades so calling them "smaller" is debatable.
Sony isn't broke, yes, but they can't eat the cost the way a $2 trillion company like Microsoft can eat the cost. That's a big different that has to be understood here. PlayStation generates a lot more of Sony's annual revenue than Xbox does Microsoft's, and it's not even close.
Sony is also a Japanese-based company, so they trade on the yen, while Microsoft is an American-based company and trades on the dollar. The dollar is much stronger than the yen at this time. These are economic factors outside of just gaming that all companies have to consider, Sony is no different.
Again, I don't personally agree with the way Sony went about announcing this or really doing it. They should've made a preparation announcement to customers a month before doing it; they could've hid the increase in some additional bundles and pushed out bundles primarily going forward (when it comes to 1P games for example vast majority selling are the PS5 versions so the bundles kill two birds with one stone).
However I'm not angry at the price increase itself. I'll still be getting a PS5 at some point this year (most likely), me being in America does kind of help though. There will still be many people in the affected regions buying PS5s this year, too, despite what sensationalist outcries on Twitter or other forums, or lame-tier clickbait articles on third-rate websites, may try indicating. If there's extra stock, it'll just get redistributed to America.
