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Sony’s PlayStation 5 went on sale Thursday, just two days after rival Microsoft released its latest Xbox, with next-gen consoles vying for holiday dominance as the pandemic increases demand for games.
With pre-orders pointing to a record launch, market leader Sony is counting on big-priced exclusive games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales to keep the edge over its American challenger.
With the increase in coronavirus cases in many countries, launch events are out of the question and crowds of impatient customers out of the question.
While the new Xbox is available worldwide Tuesday, the PS5 is available from Thursday in Australia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, North America and South Korea, but players elsewhere will need to wait until November 19. Sony has not announced any release. date for the PS5 in India.
In Sydney, only a handful of customers were picking up their pre-ordered consoles on Thursday morning.
“It’s COVID, so I guess not many people want to rush for a launch,” Theo Pasialis said as he picked up his PlayStation.
Jonathan De Botton, a customer, said the atmosphere was far from the launch of the PS4, when lines of customers stretched out in a mall food court.
Today was “completely different”, he told AFP.
“It was a midnight launch… It was a good time,” he added.
Today, by comparison, it was “a bit of a ghost town”.
Consoles are going on sale with the pandemic, creating a massive spike in demand for games from people trapped at home and looking for a distraction or a way to pass the time.
It’s unclear how long this boom will last, with news this week of progress on a vaccine for the virus causing the gaming industry to liquidate in the stock markets as investors anticipate a return to normal life.
lion sharing
For Sony, the stakes with its new console are significantly higher than for Microsoft, because the game generates the lion’s share of the profits of the Japanese firm and about a third of its sales.
Gaming only accounts for 10% of Microsoft’s sales, by comparison.
But Sony’s margin on the PS5 will be slim, if not negative, analysts say, with the company relying on online games, services and subscriptions sales for profit.
Sony plans to sell 7.6 million PS5 consoles by the end of March, surpassing the performance of the PS4.
And it will rely heavily on the US market to achieve this, with the Japanese video game market more mobile-driven and still dominated by Nintendo, said Serkan Toto, analyst at Kantan Games.
“You’re talking about a relatively small market in Japan … pushing Sony to centralize PlayStation activity in one area, and that area is the United States,” he told AFP.
Toto has said he expects the PS5 to outperform the PS4.
“I think the PlayStation 4 has been so successful that Sony has cultivated a much larger fan base for PlayStation content,” he said.
PlayStation 5 is priced at Rs. 49,990 in India, while the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is priced at Rs. 39,990. In comparison, the US price of the PlayStation 5 is set at $ 499.99 (around Rs 36,700) and the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition at $ 399.99 (around Rs 29,400).
That’s more than the $ 300 (roughly Rs 22,300 crore) price tag for Microsoft’s less powerful Xbox Series S, which also doesn’t have a disc drive.
What is the best TV under Rs. 25,000? We discussed it on Orbital, our weekly tech podcast, which you can subscribe to through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just click the play button below.
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