Hopefully MS has the money to invest in the price cut, and Sony can do the same with the cheaper slim? I expect we will see YoY declines from both from now on if we do not see a significant price cut.
I don't think PS5 will have any major YoY decline although I still kind of question the price of the new Digital at $449. It should probably be $399 or at least throw in a cheap game if it's going to be $449.
Xbox is the one that risks seeing a significant YoY decline IMO unless they make some drastic changes. The Day 1 PC stuff is actively hurting the value proposition of the console itself, that is plainly obvious and has been for a long time. Hellblade 2 has to deliver. Avowed has to do good and make up for the rather ugly artstyle shift. MS should probably aggressively tie in free cosmetics, skins, item & in-game currency perks for COD and other 1P games to Game Pass subscriptions. In addition to market the hell out of next year's COD of course.
And maybe stop with the damn Samsung Game Pass commercials. Just so many mixed signals from them at the top, no wonder the hardware is struggling to survive.
I think it would be $500 without a disc drive period. And built in a way that you can buy the current PS% DD and use it on the Pro too. And I expect that in May/June next year we will be seeing the PS5 $400 console with a bundled game and no disc drive too. I just don't see Sony being able to maintain this $500 price point for most of next year. In fact, I expect that as early as March next year, the PS5 DS will be being sold for $399 (not $450), or $450 with bundled games.
What I am curious to see is how the $350 pricing for the XSX would impact its sales. If even with that its sales are still poor, then that is pretty much the end of that console.
Yeah, same here. It's a bit unfortunate the macro conditions with the economy, but it is what it is. Granted if Sony do a $50 price cut by the time you suggest, that'll be roughly 3.5 years after the system was put on sale. Not a bad stint at all to go until feeling the need, to do a first actual, permanent price cut. I think the Pro will certainly also boost sales for 2024 as well; IIRC the PS4 Pro sold at a 1:5 ratio for every base PS4.
Of course, that was before Sony really started doing PC ports, and I do genuinely think they're starting to see why that could be a bad deal for the console in the long run (for the marquee games) even with 2-year windows. I don't think Jim Ryan's comments on PC being a competing platform were a one-off. My point being, if you want to give people a reason to buy a PS5 Pro, the Pro should be your priority for making beefier-performing versions of your games, not PC. There is just way too much competing crossover IMHO. So I think HFW is probably going to be one of the last (if not the last) ports of a 1P traditional title to PC for the rest of this gen, or at least before they significantly increase that window of porting opportunity to 4-6 years, as it should be (if they still want to bring the games to PC anyhow). Obviously a lot (not all) of the non-traditional GaaS titles will probably be exempt from this however.
Microsoft have been keeping that $349 Series X sale going for well into December. This really does in ways feel like a final gambit; like you said if December sales are still poor, that's more or less a wrap. I think they can recover somewhat with next year's COD and getting hyper-aggressive with marketing and Game Pass-tied free perks/rewards and such, but even that might only get them but so far. In any case, market performance this holiday will have serious implications on what business model Microsoft continues Xbox with going forward. I don't see the hardware itself going away, but I can absolutely see a shift away from it operating on a normal console business model, the hardware becoming much more PC-like, more focused on running Windows (in some form) like a "standard" PC, shifting away from a subsidized model (selling the console at higher price for upfront profit), going more fully multi-platform in software support, etc.
Which honestly would all be good things IMO for them and open up opportunities to actually be meaningfully unique in the market, instead of acting mainly like a poor man's PlayStation. It would just make people like Tim Dog absolutely angry and livid tho, because they'd know what that type of shift means for their console-warring rhetoric: it'd come to an end.
