You'll never pay more for a game console with fewer games than you will at launch. I use that saying to encourage potential early adopters to generally wait for a few "must own" titles and a few hardware price drops before making the leap to a new generation of hardware. But after nearly two years of waiting, Western consumers with their eyes on a PlayStation 4 are still generally staring at the same baseline price: $399 (or €399/roughly £300 in Europe).
That's no longer true in Japan, where Sony announced this morning that the PS4 is coming down from its launch price of ¥39,980 to ¥34,980 on October 1. Even before the price drop, a weak Japanese yen meant that Sony's home country was generally the cheapest place in the world to buy a PS4. Now, at the equivalent of about $291 (or €258/£190), the PS4 is significantly cheaper in Japan than elsewhere.
Is this a sign that Sony is getting ready to drop the PS4's price in the rest of the world? It would be tempting to think so. While the Western asking price of the PS4 hasn't budged, Sony did deign to add a free downloadable game to the $400 package last December, and the system currently comes with a free download of The Last of Us Remastered or Destiny: The Taken King. That free game bundling was likely in response to aggressive holiday pricing from the Xbox One last year, which first jettisoned the expensive Kinect pack-in in June, then came down to $349 with bundled games during the 2014 holiday season.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment