It’s been just under a month now since we saw the launch of new consoles. Sony launched their PS5, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. While they are out and it’s just part of life now, it can be easy to forget that the marketing on both Sony and Microsoft’s side was unusual. Without the centralized event of E3 this year, neither company wanted to reveal their prices, which lead to a lot of speculation (and concern) that these new boxes were going to be very pricey. In the end, however, that didn’t end up being the case. Considering the world kind of being on fire, and a lot of financial woes in a looming recession, it’s also lead to speculation Sony’s PS5 probably was going to be more expensive. However, Jim Ryan insists that isn’t the case.
In an interview in EDGE magazine (issues 353), Ryan was asked if the price had changed at all due to the pandemic. He said it hadn’t. The PlayStation CEO stated they had the price determined by early 2020 (though does not give a month, but it must be very early since the pandemic was affecting things on a global scale as early as March and April). He denies that COVID or lockdowns impacted the decision, saying that it was all about getting a machine out with a price tag they were happy with and had worked to great success for them in the past.
“Our preferred pricing was determined early in this calendar year, pre-lockdown. And we just got on and executed with what we wanted to do.
“No, no, it didn’t [change], no. We’ve been able to launch PlayStation 5 at $399, €399, with all the horsepower and the feature set that the console has, at the same price that we launched PS4 back in 2013. That was important for us, and we’re very happy that we’ve been able to do that. $399 worked very well for us last time round and we’d like it to work very well for us this time round, too.”
Ryan has stated roughly the same thing in the past, as well, shortly after the price was officially revealed. There will, of course, be skeptics considering some of the technology powering the PS5, but in the end, it doesn’t matter at this point, because the prices are what they are. Now it’s just a game of actually getting one.