It feels like a kind of foreign concept these days, but there used to be a period in the gaming industry where consoles would drop in price the longer they sat on store shelves. Consoles would be released at a premium at launch and then drop in price pretty drastically after a few years to get more people on board, and the console makers would just eat the cost.
Those days seem to be long gone, thanks to memory shortages and other factors forcing companies like PlayStation, Valve and Xbox to raise the price of their consoles to the point where an Xbox Series X will now cost you 50 percent more now than it did at launch. This has caused console sales to drop dramatically, and former Sony president Shawn Layden believes that this is the reason why the PS5 will never be able to recreate the success it had with the PS2.
The PS5 won't match the PS2's sales thanks to the lack of price cuts
This comes from Layden in a recent interview with the PSI Podcast (thanks GamesRadar), where the former Sony executive discussed the state of PlayStation right now and how it compares to the days of the PS2. For example, he talks about some of the challenges PlayStation faces with its hardware, pointing to chip shortages driving up component prices, which will ultimately mean the PS5 will likely never command a price like the hardware did in previous generations.
“I think the hardware industry is particularly challenged,” says Layden. “We used to build the business at launch at $399 and, over time, bring it down to $199. That pattern hasn't played out in this generation of hardware. I retired right before the PS5 launch, so I don't have any inside information on why that's true, but the chip market as we all know is in high demand.”
Ex-Sony Boss defends decision to port PlayStation games to PC
Shawn Layden claims that someone buying a PlayStation game on Steam is not the same as a lost console sale.
It's a shame, because if you look at the PS2, the most successful platform in gaming history, it sold like 185 million units or something. But if you look at the sales curve, a large percentage of those units were sold when it came in under $199. So the price drop really accelerated a lot of those growth units, which you're obviously not going to see for this generation.”
That's definitely a shame, and as we head into the next generation of consoles, which analysts predict will cost upwards of $1,000 without a disc drive, you have to assume that the days of hugely successful consoles like the PS2 are basically over. The PS2 will likely always reign supreme, especially if price cuts are now a thing of the past.
- Stamp
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Sony
- Original release date
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November 12, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
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Disc edition: $499.99; Digital Edition: $399.99
- Processor
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AMD Zen 2, 8-core / 16 threads, 3.5 GHz
- Resolution
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Max 8K (4k at 120 Hz playable)
