In a vacuum, it might work. Unfortunately for them, there are decades of quality games that are completely outside of Sony’s grasp. We can wait, lol. I am still waiting for last of us to go on a steep sale. I can wait :)
The Steam Deck did that, and I would happily buy a Sony handheld or something if it offered value.
But no, they instead want me to buy a locked down system that competes with my existing PC, and their sales pitch is, “buy this or you can’t play these games.” I don’t respond well to threats of FOMO, so I’m not going to buy it. I own a Switch and a Steam Deck because they provide value I can’t get elsewhere, I don’t own a Playstation or an Xbox because they don’t.
Yeah, I bought it because it was an interesting form factor, not too expensive, and I could repurpose it if I ended up not liking the Steam experience. I honestly play 99% Steam games, so I’m liking it a lot.
I don’t buy most consoles (except Switch) because they’re not interesting form factors, games are generally a lot more expensive, and it’ll just become ewaste.
If Sony made a good, standalone handheld, I might get it. If Microsoft continued the Kinect, I might get an Xbox (I had the 360 for Kinect in the past). But no, neither is compelling, so I don’t buy them.
When so much is multi-player now, the cross platform stuff sucks on console. Average PC players are gods compared to using a regular controller on console.
If it helps, I mostly got it so I could play fun couch co-op games w/ my kids. We’ve taken it camping, on road trips, etc, and it’s honestly quite good for that.
Yes, Nintendo is anti-consumer and way worse in that regard, but they really deliver on the “new ways to play” angle. I just can’t get anything like the local multiplayer experience I get with Nintendo elsewhere, and that’s true for almost all of their history:
NES - awesome accessories, like the DuckHunt gun, running pad, etc
N64 - local multiplayer games were fantastic, and the controller was interesting
Wii - controller made for a very fun casual multiplayer experience
Switch - very portable and the joycons are very easy to pass around
And their handhelds were all the best on the market:
gameboy - first and had fantastic battery life, the gameboy color was immensely popular; no competition whatsoever
gba - way better gameplay experience vs gameboy, Sega Game Gear had terrible battery life, huge back catalogue with gb compat, so upgrading was a no-brainer
Nintendo DS - PSP had better hardware, DS had better battery life, better load times, and just better portability all around; 3DS improved on this
Nintendo has continually delivered an interesting gaming experience with almost each generation. That’s why they appeal to people despite the anti-consumer behavior they have, and that’s why I buy their systems.
Valve gets most of my gaming money because they win the rest of my priorities, but Nintendo gets some too. PS5 and Xbox compete in all the ways I don’t care about, Nintendo and Steam compete in the ways I do.
i’ve never been a big Nintendo fan, i got the Wii and the Nintendo DS as a child but that’s all. I don’t understand the reason to buy a switch when a Steam Deck can do exactly the same and much more imo, But i got your point.
But it can’t. Can you remove the controllers and play with a friend? Can you slip it in a bag, just in case? Can you play on an airplane or road trip without worrying about battery life?
The Steam Deck is fantastic for single player gaming, which is why I have it. But battery life isn’t great for portability (road trips or flights), and for multiplayer, you basically need to hook it up to a TV and have more controllers.
I don’t see much point in a Switch Lite except to reuse games from another Switch you have.
Depend if you’re apart pc or console team at first, as a pc user why would i buy a console that only let me play the games of the manufacturer with a obsolete hardware while i could do the same + any games running on pc with the other one ?
What it actually does in my case is make me forget about the game before it comes to PC, and just not buy or play it. I might be excited about a game now while the hype is fresh but in 6 months, I’ll be excited about other stuff. If anything, I’ll buy it when it’s 75% off on some Steam sale.
They lost me when they let scalpers buy up all the PS5s in my area. That money went to a gaming PC when those components became available. I was fighting to give them my money and they didn’t give a damn.
Hard pass, Sony. Should’ve treated your actual customers better.
Sony could have required retailers to do things like limit items per customer or not sell it at all. Sony could have made an actual attempt to sell directly to consumers. They supposedly had a program for that and even that didn’t let me buy a console from them. All they had to do was limit 1 to people who had existing PSN accounts for X amount of time and they weren’t even willing to do that. I’ve had my one and only PSN account since the early PS3 days and had every console up to the PS5, including the handhelds and many accessories. Paying fans like me should have been their top priority to sell to since they sell consoles at a loss and hope to make up the difference in games and accessories we buy for said console.
They had plenty of power to prevent or reduce it from happening and they didn’t do a damn thing. Hell yeah I’m swearing off the PS5 for that experience. Fuck them.
Plus, this PC building experience was legitimately fun and PC gaming is a much better way to go in many ways. Sony did me a favor realizing this and people like me won’t be coming back for the PS6 either.
Sony absolutely did sell consoles directly to consumers. That’s how I got mine lol.
Sony has absolutely no interest in enabling scalpers. They gain nothing, and in fact lose out on revenue because of it themselves. The PS5 initially sold at a loss, with the assumption that buying games, accessories, and subscriptions will turn the whole ecosystem profitable for Sony. Scalpers arent buying subscriptions. They probably aren’t buying games because the digital market makes the supply close to infinite. They probably aren’t buying accessories because the supply was similarly not restricted. So the only thing scalpers are doing is giving Sony a loss, delay the consumer’s ability to buy anything that’s profitable from Sony, then taking more cash out of the hands of consumers that, arguably, might have been used to buy more games/subscriptions/accessories. Sony has absolutely nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose from scalping.
Scalping affects all kinds of industries. It’s only even possible when demand exceeds supply at a given price point. I have no reason whatsoever to believe Sony was purposefully restricting supply (it was in their best interests to produce as many units as possible).
Any further action restricting scalpers would be the responsibility of retailers. Sony can’t just force Target or Wal-Mart to incur additional expenses to start tracking who is buying PS5’s and restricting those. Even when retailers do it, it’s usually a joke to work around. Heck, the minimum-wage employees tasked with enforcing such rules might be the ones doing some scalping to try to supplement their income.
The only way to eliminate scalping is to make it unprofitable. One way of doing that is… Just don’t buy from scalpers. But consumers cannot organize and behave rationally like thaf- the free market is often a downward spiral of bad decisions, and a lot of casual consumers just don’t care about spending a couple hundred dollars more.
The other way is to raise prices. If Sony and Wal-Mart are selling something for $500 and a scalper can flip it on eBay for $900, getting $400… That means that consumers are willing to pay $900 for that item. Perhaps it should have originally sold at retail for closer to $900? But then the narrative would be that Sony was overcharging- that the PS5 was a luxury item for rich people only. Even if it sold out, the stigma would stick for the whole generation (like the PS3).
Sony made a product everyone really wanted and charged less than they could, and you want to blame Sony for actions of all the people between you and them?
You said the experience of building a PC was great (it can be- I’ve built several myself), but aren’t you forgetting about all the shortages, supply machines issues, and scalping that happen within that industry as well? I never saw pictures of cryptofarms with tens or hundreds of PS5’s hooked up. NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have all received criticism for not doing enough to prevent scalping for various product launches over the past few years- are you bringing the same energy to them?
Nintendo arguably has restricted supply artificially with things like Amibo and there were allegations they did so with the Wii as well. Are you boycotting them?
It’s perfectly fine to just… Not want a PS5. PC’s are good too, and a lot of people have both.
Yeah, so Valve had 3 years to prepare while Sony basically launched at the same time as the shortage began. I’m not sure what the point is supposed to be; I think even the harshest Sony critics agree that there’s not a whole lot Sony could’ve done differently given the circumstances. I mean, what do you think Sony could’ve done differently?
I thought way evga used to handle sales of GPU with people being sent a message when they were next on queue was a great way of handling shortages so people didn’t have to try and go stand in line for hours or try to check out before bots online. Same with how steam handled the sale of their steam deck letting people know when they were next in line.
I was saving up to buy PS5 for a long time too. But, when I couldn’t buy one, I just bought PS4 for half price and then, since Sony releases it’s games on PC anyway, I am not going to buy PS5. I have no need for that.
I still haven’t played Cyberpunk yet, which seems like it’s aimed directly at me and I really want to play, just because it hasn’t been cheap enough on the Steam sales yet. I think they might be slightly underestimating the patience of PC gamers lol.
There are at least tens of thousands of games to play on the PC. They must expect FOMO to be a huge motivator but I don’t think it’s going to have much of an effect.
Either that or, I might get a used PS4 together with used physical copies of the games in a few years, when it’s much cheaper, play them and then sell it all again or give it to my brother or something.
I’m not pissed at this strategy like typical ones, however I absolutely hate having my collection of a series split across platforms and feel like this isn’t the least common idea. Now, if they were to include the older game in with the new one in this strategy or have some sort of cross buy feature for older titles, but this will never happen.
Jokes on them, I rarely buy a game at release anyway. An extra year of console players beta-testing the game just means I am more likely to know a game is a dud that much sooner.
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In a vacuum, it might work. Unfortunately for them, there are decades of quality games that are completely outside of Sony’s grasp. We can wait, lol. I am still waiting for last of us to go on a steep sale. I can wait :)
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Nah, I’m good.
If they want to entice me, they need to:
The Steam Deck did that, and I would happily buy a Sony handheld or something if it offered value.
But no, they instead want me to buy a locked down system that competes with my existing PC, and their sales pitch is, “buy this or you can’t play these games.” I don’t respond well to threats of FOMO, so I’m not going to buy it. I own a Switch and a Steam Deck because they provide value I can’t get elsewhere, I don’t own a Playstation or an Xbox because they don’t.
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Yeah, I bought it because it was an interesting form factor, not too expensive, and I could repurpose it if I ended up not liking the Steam experience. I honestly play 99% Steam games, so I’m liking it a lot.
I don’t buy most consoles (except Switch) because they’re not interesting form factors, games are generally a lot more expensive, and it’ll just become ewaste.
If Sony made a good, standalone handheld, I might get it. If Microsoft continued the Kinect, I might get an Xbox (I had the 360 for Kinect in the past). But no, neither is compelling, so I don’t buy them.
When so much is multi-player now, the cross platform stuff sucks on console. Average PC players are gods compared to using a regular controller on console.
Good thing I don’t play multiplayer games very often.
Good thing I quit multiplayer games that aren’t just against friends a long time ago.
I agreed with you until you talked about the switch
If it helps, I mostly got it so I could play fun couch co-op games w/ my kids. We’ve taken it camping, on road trips, etc, and it’s honestly quite good for that.
Nah i mean he blamed Xbox and Playstation but praised Nintendo while in fact Nintendo is as anti-consumer as the others
I wrote both things.
Yes, Nintendo is anti-consumer and way worse in that regard, but they really deliver on the “new ways to play” angle. I just can’t get anything like the local multiplayer experience I get with Nintendo elsewhere, and that’s true for almost all of their history:
And their handhelds were all the best on the market:
Nintendo has continually delivered an interesting gaming experience with almost each generation. That’s why they appeal to people despite the anti-consumer behavior they have, and that’s why I buy their systems.
Valve gets most of my gaming money because they win the rest of my priorities, but Nintendo gets some too. PS5 and Xbox compete in all the ways I don’t care about, Nintendo and Steam compete in the ways I do.
i’ve never been a big Nintendo fan, i got the Wii and the Nintendo DS as a child but that’s all. I don’t understand the reason to buy a switch when a Steam Deck can do exactly the same and much more imo, But i got your point.
But it can’t. Can you remove the controllers and play with a friend? Can you slip it in a bag, just in case? Can you play on an airplane or road trip without worrying about battery life?
The Steam Deck is fantastic for single player gaming, which is why I have it. But battery life isn’t great for portability (road trips or flights), and for multiplayer, you basically need to hook it up to a TV and have more controllers.
I don’t see much point in a Switch Lite except to reuse games from another Switch you have.
Depend if you’re apart pc or console team at first, as a pc user why would i buy a console that only let me play the games of the manufacturer with a obsolete hardware while i could do the same + any games running on pc with the other one ?
Gravity Rush was great and I’m disappointed no one has done anything similar since.
Has timed exclusivity of any game made someone buy a console? It always felt like a ridiculous notion to me.
Maybe it’s because I never buy games at launch
What it actually does in my case is make me forget about the game before it comes to PC, and just not buy or play it. I might be excited about a game now while the hype is fresh but in 6 months, I’ll be excited about other stuff. If anything, I’ll buy it when it’s 75% off on some Steam sale.
Then after buying it at 75% off I never even bother to install it.
I’m like a video game version of someone pinning moths to a board.
They lost me when they let scalpers buy up all the PS5s in my area. That money went to a gaming PC when those components became available. I was fighting to give them my money and they didn’t give a damn.
Hard pass, Sony. Should’ve treated your actual customers better.
Those scalpers weren’t buying from Sony.
You walked away from ps5s forever because a multinational corporation didn’t cater to you personally?
Sony could have required retailers to do things like limit items per customer or not sell it at all. Sony could have made an actual attempt to sell directly to consumers. They supposedly had a program for that and even that didn’t let me buy a console from them. All they had to do was limit 1 to people who had existing PSN accounts for X amount of time and they weren’t even willing to do that. I’ve had my one and only PSN account since the early PS3 days and had every console up to the PS5, including the handhelds and many accessories. Paying fans like me should have been their top priority to sell to since they sell consoles at a loss and hope to make up the difference in games and accessories we buy for said console.
They had plenty of power to prevent or reduce it from happening and they didn’t do a damn thing. Hell yeah I’m swearing off the PS5 for that experience. Fuck them.
Plus, this PC building experience was legitimately fun and PC gaming is a much better way to go in many ways. Sony did me a favor realizing this and people like me won’t be coming back for the PS6 either.
Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies.
Sony absolutely did sell consoles directly to consumers. That’s how I got mine lol.
Sony has absolutely no interest in enabling scalpers. They gain nothing, and in fact lose out on revenue because of it themselves. The PS5 initially sold at a loss, with the assumption that buying games, accessories, and subscriptions will turn the whole ecosystem profitable for Sony. Scalpers arent buying subscriptions. They probably aren’t buying games because the digital market makes the supply close to infinite. They probably aren’t buying accessories because the supply was similarly not restricted. So the only thing scalpers are doing is giving Sony a loss, delay the consumer’s ability to buy anything that’s profitable from Sony, then taking more cash out of the hands of consumers that, arguably, might have been used to buy more games/subscriptions/accessories. Sony has absolutely nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose from scalping.
Scalping affects all kinds of industries. It’s only even possible when demand exceeds supply at a given price point. I have no reason whatsoever to believe Sony was purposefully restricting supply (it was in their best interests to produce as many units as possible).
Any further action restricting scalpers would be the responsibility of retailers. Sony can’t just force Target or Wal-Mart to incur additional expenses to start tracking who is buying PS5’s and restricting those. Even when retailers do it, it’s usually a joke to work around. Heck, the minimum-wage employees tasked with enforcing such rules might be the ones doing some scalping to try to supplement their income.
The only way to eliminate scalping is to make it unprofitable. One way of doing that is… Just don’t buy from scalpers. But consumers cannot organize and behave rationally like thaf- the free market is often a downward spiral of bad decisions, and a lot of casual consumers just don’t care about spending a couple hundred dollars more.
The other way is to raise prices. If Sony and Wal-Mart are selling something for $500 and a scalper can flip it on eBay for $900, getting $400… That means that consumers are willing to pay $900 for that item. Perhaps it should have originally sold at retail for closer to $900? But then the narrative would be that Sony was overcharging- that the PS5 was a luxury item for rich people only. Even if it sold out, the stigma would stick for the whole generation (like the PS3).
Sony made a product everyone really wanted and charged less than they could, and you want to blame Sony for actions of all the people between you and them?
You said the experience of building a PC was great (it can be- I’ve built several myself), but aren’t you forgetting about all the shortages, supply machines issues, and scalping that happen within that industry as well? I never saw pictures of cryptofarms with tens or hundreds of PS5’s hooked up. NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have all received criticism for not doing enough to prevent scalping for various product launches over the past few years- are you bringing the same energy to them?
Nintendo arguably has restricted supply artificially with things like Amibo and there were allegations they did so with the Wii as well. Are you boycotting them?
It’s perfectly fine to just… Not want a PS5. PC’s are good too, and a lot of people have both.
You make it sound like Sony couldn’t do anything about it, that it’s just a normal thing we should expect now.
Funny that Valve managed to release the steamdeck without this problem.
Sony just didn’t care
The PS5 came out at the start of a chip shortage. The Steamdeck came out as the shortage was resolving. That’s hardly an accurate comparison.
The shortage only started to lessen in 2023, while the steamdeck released in 2022.
Also Valve delayed the release of the steamdeck due to the shortages.
Yeah, so Valve had 3 years to prepare while Sony basically launched at the same time as the shortage began. I’m not sure what the point is supposed to be; I think even the harshest Sony critics agree that there’s not a whole lot Sony could’ve done differently given the circumstances. I mean, what do you think Sony could’ve done differently?
Waiting list system the same Valve did? Registrations with 1 unit per person? Idk literally anything other than ignoring the problem?
Sony literally did those things. I can’t believe you’re making me stick up for Sony of all people lmao
I thought way evga used to handle sales of GPU with people being sent a message when they were next on queue was a great way of handling shortages so people didn’t have to try and go stand in line for hours or try to check out before bots online. Same with how steam handled the sale of their steam deck letting people know when they were next in line.
I was saving up to buy PS5 for a long time too. But, when I couldn’t buy one, I just bought PS4 for half price and then, since Sony releases it’s games on PC anyway, I am not going to buy PS5. I have no need for that.
Good luck with that.
Hey Sony, are you stupid?
Folks on Steam: set up tents and lawnchairs
Like us pc gamers don’t know how to wait out a game
I still haven’t played Cyberpunk yet, which seems like it’s aimed directly at me and I really want to play, just because it hasn’t been cheap enough on the Steam sales yet. I think they might be slightly underestimating the patience of PC gamers lol.
Oh, really? I feel like I grabbed it for like, $30 or so a couple months back.
I’m very cheap lol, and I think the cheapest I’ve seen it in Canada was about $40. Close, but I think they can do better!
There are at least tens of thousands of games to play on the PC. They must expect FOMO to be a huge motivator but I don’t think it’s going to have much of an effect.
I’m not going to buy a PS just to play a few exclusives/timed exclusives, just not going to happen.
Either the game gets ported to PC, or I don’t get to play it. Simple as that.
Either that or, I might get a used PS4 together with used physical copies of the games in a few years, when it’s much cheaper, play them and then sell it all again or give it to my brother or something.
Sony are severely underestimating how many years I’m already behind on big “tentpole releases” (missus).
Nope
I’m not pissed at this strategy like typical ones, however I absolutely hate having my collection of a series split across platforms and feel like this isn’t the least common idea. Now, if they were to include the older game in with the new one in this strategy or have some sort of cross buy feature for older titles, but this will never happen.
Lol good luck
Jokes on them, I rarely buy a game at release anyway. An extra year of console players beta-testing the game just means I am more likely to know a game is a dud that much sooner.