They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.
If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don't bubble down to PC).
Jesus christ, Nintendo is gonna win it all aren't they?
Completely different strategy: the PS4 generation has produced a lot of games, sony could have stopped trying to compete with the high end PC market and gone in the Nintendo direction. Gives us new ways to access their library, give developers new tools to play with, release a 2nd mid-gen refresh and release a ps4 slim that is equivalent to the ps4 pro, encourage games for new ps4-slim and ps4 pro+. What do you think?
I see lots of people in this thread saying to go to the PC or the Steam Deck, but are we ignoring that both systems do not have a disc drive too?
I mean, aside from the disgusting price of the PS5 Pro not having a disc drive is the biggest offender (and the reason why I am not even considering buying it, despite being a Sony user since the 1st unit).
Yup, not even slightly surprising, I do believe we have saw the last disk in a game console bit of a pity they are doing it in a refresh but you could tell from the bolted on disk drive that the only reason they added one at all is they would have lost alot of people who don’t have internet. The modern world will soon be completely inaccessible without internet.
All good points in the comments, but something I haven't seen a anyone talk about yet:
WHY is a DISK DRIVE $80??? All it does is read a disk. Any encryption on the disk would be decrypted on the console. External disk drives are like $20. If you specially brand them maybe you could go up to $40.
But $80? That's like a Gameboy Advance. That's a miyoo mini plus. That's an entire console in itself.
Why can't you just plug in a random-ass USB 4KBR-disc drive?
Or sell one that we can use to bring in games from PS1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? And state that the drive will be able to be used going forward, into the next gen and beyond.
They've got a rich gaming history at this point and they don't care because they'd rather sell you an $80 digital copy that they can take away at any time and you can't trade it in or really own it. And it's the same with PC games as well, courtesy of Valve and then everyone else.
If the future is digital, we need laws that allow us to transfer ownership of digital content. It would have to be secure, obviously. Not just "steal somebody's console and trade all their games in".
I think they've lost touch with their user base, but I also think they know that there's some people that are just going to buy the console because they don't have a better option available.
Like don't get me wrong yes it's now the same price as a low end gaming computer and it doesn't have upgrade capability, and doesn't have a physical media drive, but you can put it right where your TV is, so no seperate setup so it takes up less space (PC games on a tv instead of a monitor looks weird and can be a pain to fix). Plus it's easier to use/more user friendly and everything is in one place.
I personally will not be upgrading past my current, as I find this generation to be super lack luster and not cost effective, but I can see why some might, I disagree with it but I see it.
Reminder that you can put in whatever you want in a PC. And that you can get a decent gaming machine for 1k (700+PS plus).
CD Drive? No problem. DVD? Of course. Another SSD? Get some random 50$ thing and throw it in there. Floppy? Harvest some old PC and voila.
Like it or not the majority of game purchases are digital these days. It's a sad development for sure. I buy all my console games as physical discs myself.
Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn't matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.
One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.
One big reason people still play on consoles to this day is because they own a physical copy of their games and can play on their consoles even offline.
At $700 you could build a pretty decent PC that would last a lot longer (3060 12gb, Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb of DDR4), and build a steam library that you'll have 20 years from now. I've had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10; controllers don't last that long. They're reaching a point where there's less and less of an actual argument for owning one.
799€ here, 920€ with a disc drive. That is stupidly insane for a console. We're almost breaking the 1000€ barrier for an "upgrade", not even the new generation.
I'd bet my money Sony is just testing the grounds to see if they can set PS6 price in a few years over the 1k barrier.
I’m genuinely curious to how those things are going to sell. My knee jerk reaction is ‘oh hell no’ but there’s a lotta console players out there that want the power but just don’t want to get into PC gaming. Of course there seems to be a lot of people still playing on last gen consoles too so I have no idea where that’s going.
You can get a gaming laptop for that stick bazzite on it or use steam big picture on launch you've got a platform that does +60fps 4k HDR with 40 years worth of games.
Consoles are getting very close to being irrelevant unless you like sports titles.
It was pretty much a given that this would happen, since there were already options with and without disc drives.
And obviously sooner or later gaming will probably move to an entirely online service like streaming.
It's just a matter of time until the internet and worldwide coverage is ready for it. I always imagined that in a distant future we'd basically only buy a controller, that connects to an app that'll let you stream. And every game will be in a subscription service like a Netflix.