131–140 of 183 posts
How strange is it that this console is to be priced considerably higher in its home market than it is in the US. Either that or Sony is hinting that they expect the yen to crash dramatically against the dollar (from 142:1 over 170:1) between now and the end of the year.
$700 and it doesn't even come with an optical drive, oof. The optical upgrade kit for the digital-only PS5 Slim is $80, so the Pro is probably going to be closer to $800 in practice unless you're already all-in on digital.
Asking this as a PC gamer who went fully digital ~15 years ago: why are optical drives such a big deal, is that because of buying/selling used games?
How strange is it that this console is to be priced considerably higher in its home market than it is in the US. Either that or Sony is hinting that they expect the yen to crash dramatically against the dollar (from 142:1 over 170:1) between now and the end of the year.
They recently increased the price of the PS5 in Japan, presumably due to the weak yen.
It is interesting but not surprising that it’s disc-optional with no pre-installed disc drive option available. Otherwise, in terms of specs and price, I am somewhat amazed that the console market is clinging on to life at this point. The PS5/Series generation pushed me to PC and I’m really not understanding the appeal of the consoles anymore beyond the convenience of not needing to do assembly. The consoles are just…
An argument is that Consoles are easier and safer to give to a child, they can't mess things up and Sony is moderating the online chat. I do not recommend it , from my experience the moderation is a blackbox, I would get warrningss for my son;s activity with no clue what was wrong, some bullshit like it might have been one of the things in this list of bad things. Then they force you to buy a sbuscription to access o…
I think there’s a good reason Sony is themselves shifting toward the PC.
$700 and it doesn't even come with an optical drive, oof. The optical upgrade kit for the digital-only PS5 Slim is $80, so the Pro is probably going to be closer to $800 in practice unless you're already all-in on digital.
Asking this as a PC gamer who went fully digital ~15 years ago: why are optical drives such a big deal, is that because of buying/selling used games?
Whereas with a disk you can pay substantially less due to your choice of competitive retailers (in my region Space Marine 2 is $79 at some retailers or $109 from Sony), buy secondhand for older titles (most of my library is secondhand), and resell or trade-in games when you're finished with them. And of course it's not tied to an ephemeral account, so you will always have access to the titles you've purchased.
Also for my use case, my PS5 doubles as a Blu-Ray player which is worth a good $100-200 just by itself.
The differences in strategies between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are absolutely wild, but I think it also really speaks to their respective DNA as a consumer electronics company, a software company, and a toy company respectively. Superficially they all look like videogame console companies, but they're very different companies that just so happen to use videogames as the means to execute their strategy. Sony seem…
Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context. And oddly enough, Nintendo themselves have pseudo-confirmed the launch will occur in Q1 next year via various official statements:
https://x.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1787736518762881197
(and then they later confirmed that they won't discuss it this year... so it's going to be Q1 next year.)
And again, to underline this point: the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers. It’s not even just Nintendo being nintendo and favoring older cheaper hardware, they seem to have internally had some pullback or change of heart back a year or two ago such that they decided not to release it.
And obviously at some point the hardware will be relatively weaker than the original switch was at its launch, so at this point they may have to update the hardware again.
But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!” when Nintendo literally had a console generation ready to go, as confirmed by multiple sources, and then just inexplicably decided to pull the plug or delay it for 2 years for inscrutable Nintendo reasons. That’s the Nintendo being Nintendo part - and we have their confirmed-in-financials timeline for release now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I bet 99% of people wouldn't even be able to tell the difference in most real world situations unless they were staring at the two systems side by side with magnifying glasses I don't think this matters at all. The market of people who uses consoles + care about graphic fidelity / fps count are basically like the audiophile community today, eating up what the companies are pushing on them.
I know a lot of console fanatics like that and they all like to keep games on disc, shunning digital. The new ps doesn't seem to have an optical drive so I'm really not sure who they're aiming this at.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And many more bluescreens/crashes/reboots from my experience. Godspeed if you aren't into tinkering and figuring out why your setup that worked yesterday is broken today. I moved from mainly PS5 to a beefy PC and the amount of troubleshooting you have to do is staggering. This kind of things never happened to me in years of playing on a console.
Yeah, gaming on a self built PC only makes sense if your time is worth ~$0.
Or there’s the steam deck, a “console” that can play PC games.
$700 and it doesn't even come with an optical drive, oof. The optical upgrade kit for the digital-only PS5 Slim is $80, so the Pro is probably going to be closer to $800 in practice unless you're already all-in on digital.
Asking this as a PC gamer who went fully digital ~15 years ago: why are optical drives such a big deal, is that because of buying/selling used games?
But yes, other obvious benefits include sharability, resellability (especially these days. So many childhood favorites sell for 200+ dollars for some reason), a perhaps false sense of preservation (I know there are some icky server issues on gen 7+ consoles, even for single player games), and simply liking the feel of a case and disc.
I don't think people commenting here realize how expensive gaming GPUs have become. A top of the line RTX 4090 is upwards of $1700. A mid range card that can play the latest AAA games at a decent resolution and frame rate (say RTX 4070) is $600-700. And if you're building a PC you still need to buy everything else around the card. Yes $700 is expensive for a console, but that's just what the market rate is now.
I do. But I also have a lovely PS5 base for $500. If we're hitting the 900 mark why not just go full premium and jump into PC gaming? PS5 is competing with itself and losing horribly.
It's also simply a disappointing move from a software standpoint. Their showcases were basically for existing first party games and Hogwarts Legacy (oh and I saw a brief glimpse at FF7 in the sizzle reel. Square "soon™" Enix, great assurance), with a vague promise of "future games" using PS5 pro tech. It feels like Playstation has barely took advantadge of current hardware (which was the biggest benefit of consoles, having one explicit spec with almost all resources dedicated to your game), so even a great showcase full of new and exciting games would have been a hard sell to upgrade.
Pay 2-300 more to get maybe 10-15 games playing better before PS6 rumors start? Why not just do the full jump to PC?