Sony Lifts PS5 Price in Europe by 25% Ahead of a Likely US Hike
The mystique Americans have built around checking whether someone is drunk is so weird to me.
Over here you take a breath test. It's not optional. You breathe into the tube and either carry on or get fined and sleep it off before moving on.
I understand that there is some weird hangup about compulsory checks in the US for some reason, as part of the weirdo libertarian nonsense they huff over there, but I've never understood the logic of how spending fifteen minutes having a cop decide whether they want to shoot you is the better alternative.
Right.
But right now, to play Fortnite tomorrow for 500 bucks that PC will give you worse looks and performance than a PS5.
I don't mind the notion that it's still a better purchase and you get a computer to work and study out of that deal and you have an easier upgrade path and no need to pay subscriptions. All that as it may be.
But it's not a no-brainer at all and it's more expensive in the vast majority of scenarios.
I'd be less nitpicky about this, but it actually was true for a couple of years in the Xbox 360/PS3 generations, when consoles were very limited by several parts of their hardware and PC GPUs were amazing value for money. Think 970-1080Ti range.
But that has changed a lot and it's important to acknowledge that while consoles have become less value by having fewer exclusives and more upkeep costs through online subscriptions, PCs have become less value by an absolutely bonkers bananas insane reduction in GPU availability and value for money. Thanks, cryptobros and AIbros.
It unfortunately takes some thinking and checking options to see what makes sense for a gamer on a budget these days. It's a lot harder than it used to be across the board, and that sucks.
You can build yourself a PC for less.
You can't build yourself a more powerful PC for less. Especially since the PS5 Pro isn't getting a price bump in Europe.
You can barely find a dedicated GPU for less money than a base PS5 at all these days. I guess if you go dumpster diving or are very patient in a used parts website you could technically get there, but it'd be a bit of a project.
Just quoting the source blog. I'm guessing the phat non-digital SKU is either still in production or still in stock.
Honestly that's because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It's been going on for a while using good old machine translators.
Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren't freaking out about it because "AI" hadn't gone viral. It's been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.
FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I've seen casually it's not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I'm not working on loc professionally. Maybe that's what he means when he talks about using it in "backend processes"?
OK, so this is weird and that headline doesn't tell the full story.
So in Europe the only price going up is the non-Pro base PS5 Digital Edition (by 10%, not 25%).
The PS5 SKUs with a disk drive are staying the same. The PS5 Pro price is staying the same. The standalone disk drive price is actually going down.
So... WTF is happening here?
I'm guessing that the fact the US dollar is collapsing thanks to tangerine man and the Euro is quickly becoming a reserve currency and the exchange rate is going up is messing with things in strange ways? Gonna guess that some manufacturing from some regions is currently more expensive to import but maybe optical drives are still being made in the EU so they can eat some of the costs that way but Australia gets hit by both? I don't know.
Man, what a mess. It's the dominoes meme but with the US having a shit public education system on one end and Australian PS5s getting more expensive in the other.
Didn't stop them when the EU prices were the higher ones due to taxes.
The headline here is confusing and not covering all the changes. Some prices are staying the same and some are actually going down. There's something else going on here and I don't get it.
I mean.. too late? Face recognition has been part of biometric passport security for years now.
If anything my first flag for this is that about 50% of the time I try it I end up having to call over a security person because it tends to flake out a bunch. I've had better luck recently, so maybe it's ready now?
This becoming an app may be the logical next step, but I do think there's some value to carrying a physical copy of the biometric data with you. If we're not losing the paper passport I don't see why I'd need to double up on recognition software. If you're already matching my face to my passport and my boarding pass is also matched to my passport it sure seems like we already have all the pieces in place for this without wasting more money on more contractors and giving them more of our data to store.
Nah, "fewer people and ship more often" isn't math.
Do the math.
Because I didn't give you "a billion dollars", Doctor Evil, I gave you ranges with actual numbers. If you have more likely ranges or more likely numbers, by all means, use those.
But do the math.
I didn't "pretend nothing else is real", I told you that games, big and small, are within some constraints. And that small games aren't the only games I want to exist. So some games are going to be five people for six months, some are going to be two hundred people for five years. You don't get to tell people (or the industry) that only one of those models is valid.
And for the record, that sixty bucks is what games have cost for "goddam near the entire history of videogames" is my entire point. Which would be easier to discern if you were less concerned with the name calling and more concerned with the reading.
Because for goddamn near the entire history of videogames sixty bucks have gotten you an increasingly bigger, more expensive game. Meanwhile, during the goddamn near the entire history of videogames a snickers bar went from 40 cents to 1.5 bucks and lost a fifth of the size.
So how do you think that worked? Because that's not "inflation games". It's inflation-inflation. Games weren't shielded from it because they're magically ordained by nature to be sixty bucks, it was a set of market reasons shaving costs and selling more units. But then that dried up and there are only two ways past that: you charge more up front or you charge more after. If, you know, you do the math.
Again, your mental model for the industry is wonky and simplistic. You can call me an asshole all you want, that is still the case. And of course, calling me an asshole doesn't mean anybody is going to listen to you. The market, driven by smarter, better informed people, will continue to look for ways to survive and make money. I would prefer for those ways to be sustainable, fair and ethical. That requires some intervention, consumer and worker protection.
"Waaah, games should be sixty forever and I think MTX are inherently more evil than subscriptions" is... not that.
Oh, and it wasn't abuse to dump a bunch of quarters a day in Samsho for the better part of five years. It was a thing I did with friends in a social setting. Was it the best value? No. Did I end up paying more than I would have buying the game up front? Very likely. Was I abused, scammed or taken for a ride? Not particularly, although I fully understand why a kid today would absolutely not see the point (and why my dad didn't either).
You are, again, oversimplifying so hard you are entirely wrong at that point.
For one thing, no, Doom didn't outsell Windows 95. That's a bit of a misquote from a thing Gabe Newell said once about MS doing a study on their Win95 penetration and finding it was ranking behind Doom at that point in time. Doom sold a few million units, between 1 and 3, by most counts. Online reference puts Win95 paid installs at 40-50 million. Made me look that up. I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast but I'm going to assume that's hyperbole, considering I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast.
But yes, games sell more copies now than they did in the 90s. Which I actively pointed out in my previous post, as part of a full on breakdown of how the perceived "full price" of a game has remained stable and that you're entirely ignoring here. GTA V has sold an insane amount of copies, but it's a massive outlier. Most games don't move 100 million copies, even when given out for free, in the same way most NES games didn't sell the 40 million copies Super Mario Bros sold. Most games move anywhere betwen a hundred thousand and a few million units. Steam, PlayStation and the other storefronts keep between 10 and 30% of that revenue, taxes keep some other chunk and publishers and devs split the rest, depending on how their relationship is arranged.
That needs to pay for anywhere between a handful and several hundred people for anywhere between six months and five years, give or take. The average salary in the US gaming industry is six figures. You do that math.
Would you still get games if that house of card fully collapsed? I mean, yeah, you'd get games in post-nuclear Mad Max wastelands, too. Gaming is inherent to humanity. Would you want a gaming industry that is entirely restricted to whatever sixty bucks per copy gets you for eternity, inflation be damned? I mean, I wouldn't.
Don't get me wrong, I spend a ton of time with small indie games. But I also spend a ton of time with larger games. I don't want any of them to go away. I will play the next Balatroesque, guy-in-a-garage roguelike that catches my attention, but I sure would like to also get to play a large narrative action game, a AAA fighting game or another big RPG an MMO or whatever else. I am extremely not game for the games industry to have to work within the confines of whatever iteration of monetization you don't think is exploitative because you grew up with it. You aren't the arbiter of what is a "scam", and you determining that subscriptions are fine because you liked playing WoW or that arcades were fine because you remember Mortal Kombat fondly or that sixty bucks is the "right" price for a videogame because that's what you paid for San Andreas doesn't mean it's the subset of options that make sense forever.
You've built a mental model of the industry, and that's fine, everybody does. But it's unreasonable for you to want that mental model to be the only valid version of a videogame that everybody gets to play. This whole conversation stems from the observation that younger people are looking nostalgically at what people like you were calling a scam in the early 00s. Me included, incidentally. It's a good exercise to get over ourselves and understand both the business reasons and the appeal that lead to each iteration of this business and art form getting popular. Turns out there was some gold in the Flash game shovelware mines, apparently, and I missed it. If you want to be the old man yelling at clouds about how games should be in a DVD for 60 bucks forever, goddamnit, I can't stop you. But you're wrong about the facts of how the industry works and why the costs are the way they are. That much is not opinion.
The things you are endorsing are part of "the business model", as you call it. Tools to expand the revenue of the game without moving the base price because people have gotten so used to it.
Ask yourself how there can be a "stable upper bound" to a product for four decades when inflation in that period has literally tripled the average price of products. Especially when the budget of a game has skyrocketed not by a factor of three, but of a hundred in that time.
I've told you how. Selling more units will only go so far. The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2. Chipping away at distribution costs is a finished process. The amount brick and mortar retailers used to keep is gone. The cost of shipping is gone. The huge cost of cartridges got turned into cheap optical media and then trivial bandwidth for digital distribution. There's no more cost to shave on that front.
But because those processes kept "a stable upper bound" (not true, by the way, cart costs meant cartridge games went as high as 100 bucks, but let's roll with it). People got used to a sticker price, the industry kept finding ways to cover increasing costs while keeping the sticker price the same. Eventually that meant selling the extra cost post-release.
And yeah, that has downsides. What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront. That's a different way to design things. It's not inherently bad, you can make good games in that model, but left to its own devices it can get very rote and intrusive. And yes, abusive if not handled correctly. It definitely needs oversight and control.
The problem is, you can't just wave a magic wand and make the economics make sense. That stuff is covering for that "stable upper bound". Costs don't follow revenue, costs follow costs and are driven by competition and the state of the art and capped by revenue. A programmer makes the money they make, not because there's game revenue flowing, but because that's what the market for all software will pay. People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about, but it's neither sustainable nor fair to pay people peanuts when Google is across the street paying six figures. A concept artist or a 3D modeller charges the same to GTA or to a Marvel movie. As it should be. Many would argue they don't charge enough to either.
So yeah, no, you're not looking at this the right way. Which is not to say some of the things you note aren't bad or haven't gotten worse. But you're dumbing this down a lot to fit the black and white terms of your outrage in a way that makes it more satisfying to rant about it online when the problem has a lot more nuance and many more hard constraints than you're making it out to have.
Your anger doesn't make this simple, and your anger at me pointing out that you're using your performative anger to dumb this down doesn't make it less true.
Alright, I'm not restarting the whole thing over, but no, it's not how buying games worked. We've gone over this. Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren't new.
I'm not calling you out for being angry because you're angry. I'm calling you out for being angry because you're making sweeping, absolute statements that are reductive, dogmatic and missing nuance and you're using anger to hide your disproportionate claims behind an appearance of outrage.
And then you acted like pointing that out was fallacious, which I'm not particularly inclined to let go.
For the record, I agree with you that voting with your wallet is nonsense and not a good way to regulate bad practices. You need actual regulation for that.
Also for the record, I didn't "make up" anything. If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as "full price". Games aren't exempt from inflation just because people have gotten used to them being sixty bucks for forty years.
Granted, some of that is the fault of game publishers squirming away from price bumps. First by hiding inflation in the lowering costs of media (and eventually going full digital) and then hiding the costs in broken down games where the rest of the cost was distributed through the experience. I'm not against that in principle, but at some point the bandaid needs to be pulled, because there's no more media and retail cost to shave and you can't keep piling up MTX forever. So yes, if you want the equivalent of three seasons of DLC in Street Fighter to be in the box, then the box takes twice as long to make and costs a lot more money.
You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want, but I'm afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things and the concept of multiplying them together are not going to budge. I'm not trolling, I'm arguing that I'd rather decide if I want to pay the full 200 bucks after paying the first 60 for the first half of the game as opposed to taking a gamble on the full amount. That is not just not dismissable as a fallacy, it's pretty obvious.
I mean, your last statement included, and I quote:
THEN WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN TO BUY THE GODDAMN GAME?
and
This shit is in FLAGSHIP FRANCHISE, SEVENTY-DOLLAR, SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES. It costs almost nothing to add. The backlash barely matters, because some fucks will lurch out to defend it.
I do understand the argument and you do sound pretty angry, man.
For the record,
The alternative is inseparable from providing everyone the whole roster, but pretending each character is worth twelve fucking dollars, so a generic fighting game is somehow worth five times what any sane person would pay up-front for one game.
You asked.
Made me double check the post name, that's how weird that response was.
Look, we're not going to agree, feel free to move on, but don't chalk up people pointing out that your screed is uncompromising and emotional to high school fallacies. Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.
I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because... well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled "Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)", which proved to be just as incorrect.
That's a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn't even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn't even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn't even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.
Well, I don't know that Larian is the problem. They don't own the D&D or the BG license and they´re moving on from both, apparently. That said, I don't know how willing they are to license their engine. I'm guessing not particularly, since they haven't done it so far, to my knowledge.
Yeeeeah, you may just be angry on principle about things that don't merit black-and-white, this-is-an-abomination rage.
No, I won't wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster. I find it very convenient to get a base game roster so the dev team doesn't have to bet the farm that the game will be successful without knowing what will happen and I don't have to pay three times as much or get a third of the game. Hell, that particular example has improved significantly, it used to be if I wanted to play Cammy on SF2 I had to pay full price to repurchase every other character in the game all over again. Screw that. You can get a character for five bucks these days. Gimme the characters one by one forever.
And I absolutely prefer MTX over subscriptions. All day any day. More convenient, typically cheaper and exactly as problematic as every other games-as-service model, no more, no less.
You can all caps and swear all you want, but digital distribution is giving you what it's giving you. You don't own your Steam games, that's just how it works.
This model has fundamental downsides that need to be addressed and probably need legislative intervention to do so, but the outcome is not going to be "you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions". Even if it made sense to regulate things to that extent, it's inconvenient, expensive and impractical. You may feel strongly about this in all caps, but... yeah, you are in a tiny majority.
By all means go find games that give you that experience. GOG is right there for you. I like it, I use it, go give them money.
But I am not advocating for a blanket ban on all DLC, microtransactions, server-dependent games or free to play games. Those are good things. I like them. They have full-on upsides. They just need to be regulated to the point where consumers are protected and media isn't an entirely fungible thing built on planned obsolescence. Those are two very different bars.
Sure.
Again, people seem to be reading this as saying "don't mod, develop full games". Not what it says. I'm saying "if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead".
In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it's worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don't like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.
"One or few programmers" is the key part of that, though. I'm not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.
But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you're spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game... I mean, get paid, man. You're doing a whole ass job at that point.
Nah, the vast majority of this is just wrong, or at least a significant exaggeration.
It's not a scam if properly implemented and communicated, and there is no requirement to have immediate access to all content in a game just because it's stored in the same package as other content you've paid to access, for one. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to play a fighting game against a player using a DLC character you don't own, since the files for the game to show you their character when you fight them are the same as the files that allow you to use it yourself.
You sort of argue against yourself by somehow granting an exception to MMOs, too, because live games have running costs in general. I'm not clear on why a loot box or a cosmetic microtransaction is supposed to be an invalid way to fund those server costs but a subscription fee is not, beyond you being stuck in some olden days assumption of commercial transactions applying only to physical goods. I hate to break it to you, but even for the most self-contained, MTX-free indie you buy on Steam you're only paying an access license fee. I don't necessarily think that's good, but it is what's happening.
And lastly, no, the entire industry won't become a F2P MTX uniform thing. That model may be very popular and genuinely huge, but standalone, offline gaming has its own market, which has in fact grown fduring most of that process in absolute size. I think part of the reason people see it as a takeover is the gaming industry likes to share bombastic, dumbed down claims about being bigger than this or that other media form and people read it like it's a single blob of things, often based on their impression of triple A gaming at some point in the past. The reality of it is that a bunch of that "half the industry by revenue" comes down to audiences that are just not engaging with the formats and distribution channels than the historically smaller hardcore gaming subset do. Which doesn't mean traditional gaming is going away, just that some other variants that may as well be an entirely different media type have grown faster.
If anything there's been a bit of crossover, where a lot of that was happening in mobile, where especially in Western markets the amount of fossilized slop at the top end started sending people and distributors back to paid up-front experiences while a bunch of PC and console gamers are now starting to fossilze into forever games (free or not) that are several years old and not moving on. I have to guess that will come and go in waves as the whole thing stops growing endlessly by double digits and becomes yet another form of legacy media just chugging along for another century.
Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you're receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so... sure, that's 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you'd have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).
So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.
Plus the "only play offline" scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.
"I wouldn't recommend one ever" is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don't know if I'd say you can build a PC that "demolishes a PS5" for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won't cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.
It's not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you'll play some games, they'll look fine with some tinkering, but that's barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that's assuming you're plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you're gonna need a monitor to go with it.
Again, not saying it's not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.
But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I'm not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I'm asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It's not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.