Sony’s PlayStation 4 Will Launch “This Holiday Season” For $399
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
PS4 multi-player online access requires PSN account & PS Plus subscription.
Kind of a buzz kill.
I think I might make this the first console I've owned in a decade... Just about everything about it makes a lot of sense to me.
Also, Kingdom Hearts 3. That alone kind of made my day.
Microsoft seems to be making a bet that people want their consoles to do more. Sony seems to be focusing just on delivering a better pure gaming experience. I get the sneaking suspicion that "gamers" are going to like Sony's approach more.
Edit: Sony apparently didn't "clearly lose" the current-gen battle.
You're only as good as your current console.
And the PS3 was released a year later than the XBox 360.
The part that's missing here is that those stats are after ~8 years of normalization. Many people that only bought a single console at first may now have two or three from that generation (i.e. could only afford one console, but over the course of close to a decade could save up and buy one or two more, especially after price drops).
The PS3 was also one of the first BluRay players, and IIRC in Japan Sony is a more trusted brand than Microsoft (or at least was). These are all factors at play here.
This is why Microsoft needs to split up. They think that their ecosystem itself delivers more value than what it's actually worth. There's simply no focus on what their customers actually want.
=== SONY ===
[Gen1] Playstation (1st place) 102 million units
[Gen2] Playstation 2 (1st place) 154 million units
[Gen3] Playstation S3 (Last place) 70 million units
Sony slipped from being 1st to nearly last. The original lack of online support & multi-media online content of the X360, The "Cell Processor" mistake, high $600 price really hit the PS3 hard, it made up for it by including a blu-ray player though and later free online multiplayer.
=== Nintendo ===
[Gen1] N64 (2nd Place) 33 million units
[Gen2] GameCube (3rd Place) 22 million units
[Gen3] Wii (1st Place) 100 million units
Things were getting bad for Nintendo until they tapped into an unknown market known to us now as "Casual Gamers". Before 2004 (much before FarmVille and other casual games) I had honestly never even heard the term at all throughout my life. Well done at discovering a new market.
=== Microsoft ===
[Gen1] n/a
[Gen2] Xbox (2nd Place) 24 million units
[Gen3] Xbox 360 (2nd Place) 77 million units
Out of no-where Microsoft (one of the most hated companies in America at the time which inspired Google's original "Don't be evil" moto ) got itself up to 2nd place consistently by catering to "Gun-Bros" and hard core gamers (the type that go to a lan party to play Halo Matches) and delivering online content near perfectly (except for the price tag of Xbox Live). It revived an old idea (playing online with strangers, something that Sega tried and failed at twice) and made it work. It also helps that internet penetration rates were much higher than the days of Sega. It also introduced the standard "achievements" and "gamertag" that we now see all over the place. And it was the 1st to launch during the Gen3 console wars.
=== Moral of the Story ===
Last year's winners are this year's losers and last year's losers are now at the top. How differently will things change in the Gen4 console wars? So far the "Wii U" is doing terribly. PS4 looks the most innovative, and Xbone looks like Microsoft's attempt of control and conquering everything in the living room without asking the consumer for input (M$ as usual).
I personally am not a fan of used games (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than piracy, since the people who made the game are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new), but publicity-wise it's a very smart move on Sony's part.
With a used game, assuming the disc itself hasn't been damaged (and if it has, you are entitled to a refund as per any retailer's used games policy), you get an identical experience to a person who purchased the game new.
Why should games be considered any different?
You also don't get an "identical experience" to a person who purchased the game new. The bits on the disc may be identical, but the experience isn't. For example, a game bought new in 2009 might look great in 2009, but by 2013 you've come to expect more. Likewise, there may be fewer players online for multiplayer experiences. There's also all sort of additional intangibles -- you probably won't be the first person in your peer group to play the game, so you can't brag how you beat it faster than someone else, or have the same feeling of shared experience when you ask "did you get past level X? How did you beat the lava golem?", and their response is "I don't know, I did that like two years ago."
The analogy isn't perfect, but hopefully it's illustrative enough. At the end of the day, both cars are video games have a certain value when new, and a certain, probably lessened, value when "used". The characteristics by which the value has decreased from new to used are different, but they're extant in both cases.
That's a fair point. But a new copy of a game bought today that was released in 2009 will also cost closer to $5 than $60 - the decreased experience in that sense is already reflected in the retail price.
For me, ideally what would happen is that used game sales would go away [1], and as a result games would become cheaper, either when they first go on sale, or through heavy discounting more frequently (because people only have a set amount of money to spend on games).
This is essentially what has already happened with PC - there are no resale options, and prices discount far, far more quickly than on consoles. If you want the 'day one experience' as you described, you can get that, for $60. But you have the knowledge that, if you wait, it'll also be available for $30 in 3 months time, and $10 in the Christmas sales. Plus, on every single copy sold, ~70% of the money is returned to the publisher/developer.
[1] edit: As I noted elsewhere, I still think you should be able to lend games to friends. That is, I think, beneficial to publishers and consumers.
I don't doubt that the publisher has probably done a little thinking about whether they'd sell enough copies at $30 rather than $50 to make up for the loss of per-sale profit, but it seems to me that what they (the publishers) are actually trying to do, by killing secondhand sales, is have their cake and eat it, too.
I suspect that publishers would love to be able to kill used games and maintain current pricing strategies, but I just don't think it'll work for them. Video game sales are too price elastic and, like you said, for people who would ordinarily buy new at $60 and resell at $30, their video gaming budget would only buy half the games it used to. These people would be more likely to wait until the games were $30.
In a worst-case scenario, if publishers persisted with that strategy, other forms of entertainment may be seen as more appealing and money might disappear from the video games industry.
Like you've said, the free market would take care of it, and I think used games are standing in the way of that being able to happen while allowing maximum compensation for the developers.
In case its not obvious, whether or not the product deteriorates has about as much to do with the legality/morality of selling a used game as my sarcastic quip does.
Non-digital products degrade as they are used. A car only has a certain number of kilometres in it. The older the car is, the worse it is to drive and the more it costs to run.
Digital goods either work or they don't. If you buy the same digital good used then you get the exact same experience as the person who bought it new.
Things that don't wear out are just different.
Ignoring the fact that discs go bad, digital goods depreciate FAR faster than cars. A 15 year old car in good shape retains most of the value it had the day it was sold. A 15 year old game is barely worth anything.
The value of a digital product like a video game declines over time, as well, even though the data on the disc doesn't degrade. The experience degrades. If that weren't the case, the used games store would be able to sell a used game for a lot more than they do.
If publishers and studios really want to kill the used games market, they'd acknowledge that their games lose value over time, and drop the prices over time accordingly. Which they do, just not enough, apparently.
A used game can be sold next to a new game at the same point in time and the used game will be priced cheaper. You will get an identical experience regardless of which you buy, that is to say, the real value of both is identical.
The shop only prices it cheaper to encourage you to buy it, because they have a higher profit margin on used games.
If you drive a car about for 50,000KM and put it back in the shop, now that car is has lower real value than the new one next to it.
"The shop only prices it cheaper to encourage you to buy it, because they have a higher profit margin on used games."
So why isn't it the publishers job to ensure that neither of these statements are true? That is, two months in, why haven't they dropped the price of the new game enough to make it attractive compared to the used copy? If they can't make any new sales because the used copies are so much cheaper, what's the point of maintaining that price?
Before the player has played the game, the value of the game disk is shown to be at least $60 dollars to that person. They show that by paying that price.
Once a player has completed a single player game, the value of the disk to that person is now zero. Given the opportunity, they will sell the game at any price they can get. They will happily trade the game in for $5.
To a new player coming along, they may still pay $60, but if there is a used (and effectively identical) copy sitting there for $55, why not buy that instead?
A shop will price match a used game down to below any price that a publisher could conceivably wish to charge because they only pay a tiny price for the identical product used.
> That is, two months in, why haven't they dropped the price of the new game enough to make it attractive compared to the used copy?
The comparison is meaningless because they are identical. The cheaper price always wins, and the used game will always have the cheaper price.
Used cars are fundamentally different than digital goods due to the fact that they can be consumed infinitely without devaluing the physical asset.
But that's not really true, at all. "Replayability" is a term that gets tossed around, a lot when describing single player games. If "the value of the disk to that person is now zero" were true, it's a term that wouldn't even exist.
Additionally, I hate to resort to anecdotes, but I'm not sure if there's any unbiased research in this area -- but I don't know anyone who buys a brand new game, plays it for a month, and then "will happily trade the game in for $5." I mean, I'm sure there are people who do fit that mold, but if that were true, then all the used games shops would only give you $5 for any month-old game. But those month-old games command a much higher price than that, precisely because people aren't happily trading in the game for $5. This is really basic econ 101 stuff here. Supply and demand.
This argument is crazy. No one considers buying a user car grand theft auto, and no one considers being the second (or third, or tenth) owner of a house as some sort of scheme to defraud homebuilders.
Cars, homes, and video games are property. It should be the right of the property owner to do what they chose with their property, including selling it. The prices of new homes and new cars have been adjusted to compensate for the fact that that property will be resold. Why are video games any different?
If game publishers can't make a profit on their wares, they either need to charge more or spend less. The secondhand games market is not the problem, at all. The efforts of the publishers to kill off the secondhand market is a great example of the same sort of crappy, cartel-like practices we decry when it's done by, say, the wireless industry. The game industry shouldn't get a free pass to behave badly like this.
I've had this opinion for a while, and it comes from a perspective where, if you're prepared to look for it, all digital content is free. It can be pirated if you want, with a negligible prosecution risk. From there, I see two reasons to purchase content: either it's more convenient than piracy (Spotify, Steam), or you want to compensate those who worked hard on creating it.
Plus, I think that when you purchase a game, you're paying for an experience, rather than an object. For that matter, this is the same with books, and movies. You aren't paying for the paper it's printed on, or the disc in the case, it's the experience you have with the content - more of a consumable than a physical item. If you think this way, it's difficult to understand why you should be able to sell the distribution method and therefore transfer ownership of an experience.
There are issues with this argument, obviously. If you buy a DVD and have friends round to watch it, it seems silly that everyone should there should have to pay, which is a natural extension of this argument. I don't really have a solution to that.
The other issue with used games that I see, is that the only people making money off it are retailers. If I spend money on a game, it's because (as I noted earlier), I want the guys who worked hard on it to be compensated. If I buy a used game, I'm just giving money to GameStop.
Because I think games are experiences rather than physical objects, I don't think the property/cars/etc analogy holds. As I noted in another comment, buying a used car is not the same a new car, whereas buying a used game gives an identical experience to a brand new one.
I agree, a video game is more an experience than some functional, utilitarian object. (Interestingly, cars are often too sold as "experiences" -- maybe this is why their value decreases so precipitously after they've been driven off the lot, heh). I think that a game's value as an experience rather than "an object", though, is orthogonal to it's actual dollars-and-cents value. The value is the price people are willing to pay, plain and simple.
That is, a brand new, $60 game isn't really worth $60 to most people after it's been out for a couple of months. The used games market is more agile in recognizing this. If the first-party publishers became more agile, they'd wipe out the used games market. Why would I pay, say, $30 for a used, six month-old game, when I can get a brand new copy for the same price? The answer: I can't. The first-party publishers are still charging at least $40 or $50 for that game. The used games shop has recognized that the true value of that game, six months in, is actually $30. The publisher is in denial, or trying to take advantage of some sort of arbitrage by charging $40 or $50.
I think you're also discounting the fact that the first-party publishers do get a portion of that used games sale. That is, when someone buys a brand-new game at $60, and sells it to the used game shop for $30 a month later -- $30 of the original $60 purchase is coming from the used sale. Sure, in some cases the person buying that used copy for $35 or $40 might have bought a brand new copy if no used copies were available, but in many cases, that person might never have bought a copy at all. If the used market is shut down, maybe I stop buying the games when they're $60, because I know I can't get some portion of that money back to spend towards other games.
Anyway, as I noted in another comment, the price of a new car has not only the cost of materials and labor factored in, but also the cost of the probability that someone who buys that car used would have bought a new one instead, had the used car not been available. Video games should also be priced like this (I suspect they are, actually, and all the handwringing by the games industry is really just a misdirection).
TL;DR: In a free market, it doesn't matter if a good is experience-based of utility-based, its' price should reflect its actual value (which is determined by the market). Secondhand games aren't taking food out of developers mouths, inability to quickly adjust price to match actual value is. Shutting down the secondhand games market is a cartel/monopoly tactic, not actually beneficial for the general public.
They then proceeded to market the xbox one during it's launch event as if that is what people want. People don't give a shit about that, really. They would have been much better off presenting what their core base wanted, and then gently pushing their core base into the direction they want, or at another event, selling all the media entertainment features as extra, after you've sold people on the core gaming experience.
You can't just go to your customer base of 10+ years and then spend hours saying "hey guys, we know you've all drooled and waited for the next big game year after year, but we're not here to tell you about that, instead, here's some social fucking tv shit we really want you to care about for advertising reasons. Also, you will have to pay a fee for used games! yay!"
Sony seems to have learned the lesson Microsoft didn't.
You seem (again, AFAICT) to make the very dangerous assumption that people bought it for streaming media, or, more importantly would buy it for streaming media/social experience, instead of buying it for games and just spend a lot of time vegging out.
The fact that one spends more time using the box to watch streaming media than playing games really doesn't tell you much. It doesn't mean that's what people want to use the box for, it just means it may have been convenient for that purpose. It's primary purpose in most households has been, at least AFAIK, to play games. The fact that it does netflix just makes it nice.
I don't think most houses would buy it the other way around, and that's how they messaged it: Something great and amazing at social media experience, that also plays games.
Microsoft can't subsidize the HW if they are aiming for the TV audience. I think their strategy is flawed.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-4-Camera/dp/B00BGAA3S2 [1] http://buy.thegameklip.com/
http://kotaku.com/ps4-video-says-playstation-plus-is-mandato...
Also, PS4's missing the Kinect entirely, so I don't think the price point is amazing.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1g24s4/the_xbox_on... [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1g24s4/the_xbox_on...
More expensive, less powerful, Comes with anti-consumer restrictions
It's a no-brainer.
Did you type that with a straight face?
Because they want to play the games that are only available on it. Or they want to play games with their friends on xbox live. Those can be very powerful motivators, games and friends aren't commodities.
I certainly hope this happens. I for one, hate platform exclusive games - it means vendor lock in, and it is anti-consumer.
I suspect there are a lot of super casual bro-gamers who will buy the new Xbox out of habit for their COD and FIFA and Madden playing.
But then you have people like me. I'm a gamer across both the PC and various consoles. The last two gens, the Xboxes were my primary console and until Sony and Microsoft started talking about their respective next consoles, I had just assumed I would buy the Xbox One and not the PS4, but seeing the two options mostly in the light now, well, I've pre-ordered a PS4 on Amazon and have no intention of buying an Xbox One. This decision is likely to directly spill over to at least half a dozen people I play games with if not more.
Microsoft really fucked themselves with the positioning of the Xbox One and at this point I don't see how they'll be able to fix it in time for launch. I'm sure they'll still sell millions of units, but this is still an epic failure that I'm pretty positive will cost them their current leadership role in the space for the next gen.
We'll have to wait and see how this translates into sales, but Sony won a lot of points for not caving to publishers on these issues.
I suspect a lot of gamers also aren't keen on the Kinect, so the extra $100 for it is another downside.
Unless they make a very overt overture towards the end of the life of that console ... In 15-20 years time, when the servers go down and the lights go out. It will be a useless piece of plastic.
Hell, in 15-20 years time even the non-collectors who hung onto their consoles will be screwed.
Unless the pirates manage to save it from obsolescence.