- Sony has yet to announce its PS5 price, but in an interview last week, SIE CEO Jim Ryan said that the console will provide the “best possible value” but not the “lowest price.”
- Sony will hold a PS5 reveal event on June 4th to show off games running on the console.
- The price and release date of the PS5 are not expected to be revealed at the event.
Providing its plans haven’t changed, Sony will host a digital event on Thursday, June 4th to showcase “The Future of Gaming” on the PlayStation 5. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan said that fans who tune in will get their first look at the games coming to the PS5, but he didn’t say anything about the hardware itself, leading us to believe that the price and release date of the console will not be revealed during this event.
Details like these may be weeks or even months away, but in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Ryan hinted at the price of the PS5, and, based on his comments, we shouldn’t expect anything budget-friendly.
“I think the best way that we can address this is by providing the best possible value proposition that we can,” Ryan said about the significant challenge of selling an expensive new product in the midst of a pandemic and an economic recession. “I don’t necessarily mean lowest price. Value is a combination of many things. In our area it means games, it means number of games, depth of games, breadth of games, quality of games, price of games… all of these things and how they avail themselves of the feature set of the platform.”
Back in February, a Bloomberg report focused on the price of the PS5 claimed that the manufacturing costs for the PS5 were approaching $450 per unit. When the PS4 launched at $399 in November 2013, IHS Markit estimated that each unit cost $381 to manufacture. If Sony wanted a similar gross margin for the PS5, it would need to be priced at $470 or more. Even before a pandemic sent the economy into a tailspin, that would have been a hard sell. One of the many reasons that the PS4 was so much more popular than the Xbox One at launch was because Sony undercut the price of Microsoft’s console by $100. Now Sony might have to convince us that $500 is a fair price.
A lot can (and certainly will) happen between now and November — or whenever the next-gen consoles arrive — but Sony appears to be preparing consumers for a higher price than they may have been expecting. After all, the PS4 Pro retails for just $399 in the United States, and goes on sale fairly frequently. The last time Sony sold a console for $499 was the launch of the PS3 in 2006, and that was an unequivocal disaster.
If Sony decides that it has no choice but to price the PS5 at or around $500, convincing fans that the console is worth half a grand will be the goal of this week’s online event and the “series of PS5 updates” to come.
