It’s been nearly 2 years, November 2013, since Sony launched its wildly popular PlayStation forAt a price of $400 but the company announced recently that it’s dropping the price on the PlayStation 4. The $350 and the price cut is permanent. It’s typical for manufacturers to lower prices on console units after they have been out a while, and analysts are somewhat surprised by this move.
Microsoft launched its slower-selling Xbox One at $500 in late 2013 and wound up dropping it all the way to $350 by this summer.
The PlayStation 4 has consistently outsold its competitors since it came out, but with the coming season and competition expected to be fierce from Microsoft and its respective exclusive lineups, Sony took the initiative with the price cut.
Selling more than 20.2 million units as of March this year, PlayStation 4 is the best-selling videogame console among the latest machine generation
Halo 5: Guardians arrives on the Xbox One in just a few weeks; it’s the most anticipated holiday exclusive of 2015 according to Nielsen. Microsoft also has a timed exclusive on the next Tomb Raider game, launching mid-November. Sony has The Uncharted Collection (the first three Uncharted games in high-defintion) and an expansion pack for its high difficulty hack-and-slash Bloodborne in late November. But merits aside, the Uncharted series has never had Halo‘s star power, and the same holds for Bloodborne, however much the game has blown the lid off expectations at north of 2 million copies sold.
“This is good news because it shows cutting assembling cost of the console is going smoothly,” said Yu Okazaki, an analyst at Nomura Securities, though he noted any big impact on Sony share price is unlikely because investors had expected the move. He added Sony is likely to introduce new European prices at a game show in Paris later this month.
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