PlayStation CEO Argues That $69.99 Is a Fair Price for Games, and That the PS5’s 667 GB of Usable Storage Is “Fine”

[Tsing]

Image: Sony



The PS5’s launch appears to be a smashing success thus far, with consoles immediately selling out left and right, but that hasn’t stopped Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO and President from making controversial statements that even die-hard PlayStation fans might have trouble agreeing with.



In a new interview with The Telegraph pertaining to the PS5’s UK launch, Jim Ryan was asked whether Sony’s decision to price its premium titles at $69.99 was fair. The executive responded positively, noting that the increase is justified based on the amount of entertainment that modern games provide.



“Yes, yes, I do,” Ryan stated. “If you measure the hours of entertainment provided by a...

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[Riccochet]

Why not just charge $200 per game and $1500 for the system then? I mean, all those hours of entertainment, the price is justified. Right?

 

[Bezant]

Very funny logic - hours of entertainment. Where is his market analysis? What can the consumer bear, etc?

 

[GunShot]

Considering that Demon Soul's only sold 20,000 - 23,000 copies in its native country Japan, it seems Ryan needs to ease up on drinking the tea of looney.

 

[Denpepe]

If the game provides me with enough hours of entertainement, sure, not for COD single player campaigns that last 5-6 hours.

 

[Brian_B]

Yeah I don't take much issue with Day 1 sales price of a game. People will pay what they think it's worth, and they will either not buy or wait for a sale - and the market has been pretty good at responding to that.

I'd much rather them come out with a higher Day 1 price than, say, lock tons of basic gameplay behind a DLC curtain or throw basic mechanics behind a cash shop something.

As to the SSD size... well, yeah.. it's "fine". It will play any game that's out on the PS Store - there is no single game that is so big that it won't fit. It's a matter of convenience as to the size past that. I think having a small drive is a pain in the rear, and without a good broadband connection it makes it doubly painful. I understand it was done just to keep the costs down - that's why they've always had pretty crappy internal storage options on consoles (apart from when consoles didn't have internal storage and the game itself lived on the cart of disc). I don't think we will ever go back to carts or discs as the primary method of distribution (much to my chagrin)... I do think Sony needs to get their butt in gear on releasing/white-listing approved add-on storage though, that should be a pretty high priority for them. And I'm a bit disappointed they didn't have a high end SKU with 2T of internal storage (that may be the 2021 refresh edition though, assuming they ever get enough stock to actually have a 2020 edition release).

 

[Brian_B]

Considering that Demon Soul's only sold 20,000 - 23,000 copies in its native country Japan, it seems Ryan needs to ease up on drinking the tea of looney.

Well... that's 1 in 5 PS5s in Japan. Not great, but you have a pretty constrained market for the software. Just like US, Japan PS5 are selling as fast as they hit the shelves, so I think that tells you something about how constrained supply is right now.

Because of supply issues, it's been Sony's second worst opening week for a console release.

I would say this is because of TSMC 7nm manufacturing constraints -- that explains both consoles, Ryzen, and RX6000 - as all of that has to bottleneck through TSMC's 7nm line, and AMD is far from TSMC's only customer. It wouldn't explain why nVidia is having such a crunch though, as they are primarily using Samsung's foundries.