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Sony’s PlayStation 5 hit stores Thursday, just two days after rival Microsoft launched its newest Xbox, with next-gen consoles vying for dominance over the holiday season as the pandemic fuels demand for games.
With pre-orders pointing to a record launch, market leader Sony is counting on high-priced exclusive games like “Spider-Man: Miles Morales” to maintain the edge over its American rival.
But with coronavirus cases on the rise in many countries, launch events are off the table and crowds of eager customers are out of the question.
While the new Xbox will hit stores worldwide on Tuesday, the PS5 will be available starting Thursday in Australia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, North America, and South Korea, but players elsewhere will have to wait until November 19.
In Sydney, only a handful of customers were picking up their reserved consoles Thursday morning.
“It’s Covid so I guess not many people want to rush to a launch,” Theo Pasialis said as he picked up his PlayStation.
Jonathan De Botton, a customer, said the atmosphere was a world away from the PS4 launch, when lines of customers stretched out to a shopping mall food court.
Today was “completely different,” he said. AFP.
“It was a midnight pitch … It was a good time,” he added.
Today, by comparison, it was “a kind of ghost town.”
Consoles go on sale with the pandemic creating a massive increase in demand for games from people trapped at home and looking for a distraction or a way to pass the time.
It’s not yet clear how long that boom will last, and this week’s news about the progress of a virus vaccine sparked a sell-off of the gaming sector on stock markets as investors anticipated a return to normal life.
the lion’s share
For Sony, the stakes for its new console are significantly higher than for Microsoft, with games generating most of the Japanese company’s profits and about a third of its sales.
By comparison, games account for only 10 percent of Microsoft’s sales.
But Sony’s margin on the PS5 will be narrow, possibly even at a loss, analysts say, and the company will rely on online game sales, services and subscriptions to turn a profit.
Sony expects to sell 7.6 million PS5 consoles by the end of March, outperforming the PS4.
And it will rely heavily on the US market to achieve this, with Japan’s video game market more focused on mobile devices and still dominated by Nintendo, said Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games.
“You’re talking about a relatively small market in Japan … pushing Sony to centralize the PlayStation business in one area, and that area is the United States,” he said. AFP.
Toto said that he expected the PS5 to outperform the PS4.
“I think the PlayStation 4 was so successful that Sony has cultivated a much larger fan base for PlayStation content,” he said.
The PS5 is priced at $ 500, like the Xbox Series X, while a version without a disc drive costs $ 400.
That’s more than the $ 300 price tag of Microsoft’s less powerful Xbox Series S, which also doesn’t have a disc drive.
Cheaper disc-less consoles are aimed at gamers with fast connections and eager to play online, and this is a group that is expanding, according to the head of Sony’s video game unit, Jim Ryan.
“Last year, it was from 50 to 50 and, one of the things that we have seen with the locks is that the digital proportion has increased in the course in 2020,” he said. AFP.
“It’s been two-thirds for digital and one-third for physical,” Ryan said, adding that Sony has no plans to launch machines with disk drives.
