How to sell next-gen consoles, Marketing, Positioning, and Pricing [2020]

[Jay]

It's not impossible to envisage a position where Microsoft price lower than Sony. It depends on how the consoles are marketed and how that resonates. XSX will be more powerful but we know PS5 is promising near zero load times. If that appeals more to consumers, regardless of the performance difference, that feature could be perceived as being more valuable. It sure as hell is to those of us with little time!

Even if one took 2 seconds to load and the other 8. That to me is a big enough difference.
I hardly play any games simply because I can't stand the loading times, even if I could manufacture a ceremony of making a drink or something while it's loading. I just want to switch on and play.

That being said for me personally, it probably would just be a huge positive if I was already getting a PS5, the same way if I was getting the xsx power would be one for that if I was already getting it. Neither being the deciding factor.
Although all things being equal I'd give up power for loading time.
The xsx loading times will be good enough i suspect.

Before everyone points it out and jumps on me, i know it's going to be a magnitude faster than current gen. But as I said current gen is too slow for me and not what i would be comparing against.

 

[AzBat]

an e-gpu that works across the entire surface line going forward could be really awesome. But it would have to include the cpu also.

You're in luck. Just so happens that AMD makes this chip called an APU. First e-APU ever! LOL

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Even if one took 2 seconds to load and the other 8. That to me is a big enough difference.
I hardly play any games simply because I can't stand the loading times, even if I could manufacture a ceremony of making a drink or something while it's loading. I just want to switch on and play.

That being said for me personally, it probably would just be a huge positive if I was already getting a PS5, the same way if I was getting the xsx power would be one for that if I was already getting it. Neither being the deciding factor.
Although all things being equal I'd give up power for loading time.
The xsx loading times will be good enough i suspect.

Before everyone points it out and jumps on me, i know it's going to be a magnitude faster than current gen. But as I said current gen is too slow for me and not what i would be comparing against.

You need Stadia.

Tommy McClain

 

[BRiT]

You need Stadia.

I think he likes his eyesight too much for that.

 

[AzBat]

I think he likes his eyesight too much for that.

After enough drinks it no longer matters. Google needs to team up with Captain Morgan or some other spirits then they can really move some product.

Tommy McClain

 

[eastmen]

You're in luck. Just so happens that AMD makes this chip called an APU. First e-APU ever! LOL

Tommy McClain

yea , I meant in addition to the one in the actual surface. I doubt that i3 in the surface pro 7 will light the world on fire..

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Even if one took 2 seconds to load and the other 8. That to me is a big enough difference.

That's wouldn't be massive for me, but it does illustrate that people value things like this differently.

The difference may be less than 2 seconds vs 8 seconds, it could be more. The Coalition said Gears will load four times faster on Series X than One X. Likewise, we saw State of Decay 2 loading in 7 seconds vs 45 seconds on Xbox One X. Are Gears 5 and State of Decay 2, both current-generation games, a good basis for what to expect? No idea.

Mark Cerny said PS5's SSD performance was transparent, i.e. no work for the developer. XSX may be different. The Coalition's Mike Raynor said "With the Xbox Series X, out of the gate, we reduced our load-times by more than 4x without any code changes." then went on to talk about specific Velocity Architecture enhancements. We know current generation games installs are littered with redundant duplicate data and they're packaged for slow HDDs.

Until we see multi-platform games loading on both side-by-side, it's guesswork.

 

[London Geezer]

2 sec vs 8 sec would be more noticeable for games where you die and respawn a lot.

On the Doom Eternal thread I made a comment about how 'long' the loading times were when respawning, and after that I thought about it while actually playing and really, most times we're talking about 5 seconds, ish. Really what we should think of 'short', in the current gen, but when it happens so often (I know, GG) then my brain saw that as 'long' loading times.

It's all relative. I think the difference between a 1-2 second 'fade to black' screen and an actual Loading screen - even 5-8 seconds - can and will be very noticeable to many people, although it is true that some people will be more or less susceptible to it.

At the same time, and staying on Doom Eternal, I was shocked that Fast travel in between a level is, actually, instantaneous. That actually shocked me.

So yes, it's all 'noticeable' even if we're talking about a few seconds here and there.

And yes, getting good and dying less is probably the solution, not the point though!

 

[MrFox]

Mark Cerny said PS5's SSD performance was transparent, i.e. no work for the developer. XSX may be different. The Coalition's Mike Raynor said "With the Xbox Series X, out of the gate, we reduced our load-times by more than 4x without any code changes." then went on to talk about specific Velocity Architecture enhancements. We know current generation games installs are littered with redundant duplicate data and they're packaged for slow HDDs.

Transparent in the sense that the underlying game data is memory mapped, so that devs can address the storage without having to decompress it, buffering the read, remapping, etc... But it will still need quite some work from the devs to exploit it, since it remains storage-class speed. MS worded it a little differently but it sounds like the same thing, they memory map the storage and there's hardware dealing with compression automatically.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's all relative. I think the difference between a 1-2 second 'fade to black' screen and an actual Loading screen - even 5-8 seconds - can and will be very noticeable to many people, although it is true that some people will be more or less susceptible to it.

Would that translate to buyer awareness? Is Joe Gamer going to know and pick a platform before-hand because of that? I would have thought that unless seeing the platforms before-hand, they wouldn't be aware, an would just compare the slower machine to their previous machine and feel it was wonderfully fast. I guess streamers are a sizeable factor, but aren't they mostly about multiplayer games where the delays in match-making will still be present?

 

[London Geezer]

Would that translate to buyer awareness? Is Joe Gamer going to know and pick a platform before-hand because of that? I would have thought that unless seeing the platforms before-hand, they wouldn't be aware, an would just compare the slower machine to their previous machine and feel it was wonderfully fast. I guess streamers are a sizeable factor, but aren't they mostly about multiplayer games where the delays in match-making will still be present?

That's why I mentioned the difference in the same game (Doom Eternal). Also I don't know a Joe Gamer, but I do know of a Joe Exotic, he has a lot of tigers and he is batshit crazy.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But how does Joe Gamer know what they're missing out of? How would they know Doom Eternal+1 is that much faster on the other machine such that they'd buy the faster-loading machine?

 

[eastmen]

Things get more complicated also if the tflop difference equates to a higher frame rate or higher resolution.

Does Joe Gamer care more about a few seconds faster loading time or a more stable frame rate or a higher resolution ?

I can tell you that for me if we are talking about my pc and I have the option of spending to get a 4 second load time vs an 8 second load time or even 12 second load time vs getting a stable 60fp or getting to he next resolution then I will go to with the second option. I don't think i'd even notice a 4 second vs 8 second load time.
Now of course if the only difference was the faster load time then sure i'd be more interested in it. But there is so much out there that when you start talking about seconds i'm not sure who is going to care

 

[PSman1700]

We don’t even know if xsx will load slower, people can’t make that decision just yet.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Things get more complicated also if the tflop difference equates to a higher frame rate or higher resolution.

Does Joe Gamer care more about a few seconds faster loading time or a more stable frame rate or a higher resolution ?

The example presented here is the difference between a fade-to-black versus a few seconds of load-screen. That'd be far more noticeable than mild differences in resolution or framerate. The TF numbers probably present a more significant difference than what'll be perceived on screen.

Now if the loading difference is 5 seconds of load screen versus 8, say, then it wouldn't be as impactful. But in the case of marketing load times, if one machine has got such a large advantage and if the buying public would prefer that platform because of it, would they even know the difference?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

We don’t even know if xsx will load slower, people can’t make that decision just yet.

It's a mostly hypothetical discussion, as evidenced by the original post containing an 'if' - "even if one took 2 seconds to load and the other 8. That to me is a big enough difference."

Hypothetically, IF one platform loads in 2 seconds and the other in 8, i) will Joe Gamer notice, ii) will it influence their buying decisions, and iii) could that be communicated so that they'd know and go to the store to buy the faster-loading machine they'd prefer?

 

[eastmen]

The example presented here is the difference between a fade-to-black versus a few seconds of load-screen. That'd be far more noticeable than mild differences in resolution or framerate. The TF numbers probably present a more significant difference than what'll be perceived on screen.

Now if the loading difference is 5 seconds of load screen versus 8, say, then it wouldn't be as impactful. But in the case of marketing load times, if one machine has got such a large advantage and if the buying public would prefer that platform because of it, would they even know the difference?

i could be wrong but isn't it 2.4 vs 5.5 before any compression from either side of which we both know they each do ? So on its face the ps5 would be slightly better than twice as fast. But if its 5 seconds vs 10 seconds it will hardly matter. We also don't know who's compression is better in practice. Sony did a deeper dive into thier ssd but ms has lightly talked about things they have done to enable faster loads outside of just raw speed.

It will be hard to say what is better without seeing optimized games for both

Its like I said , Would I take double or even triple the loading time over better frame rates or resolution ? The answer is no of course I wouldn't.

 

[BRiT]

Lines could become more blurred if PS5 does not have Quick Resume when we know Series X does.

Needless to say, it will be tough for Marketing to show this is an important enough difference to overlook the other features.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Transparent in the sense that the underlying game data is memory mapped, so that devs can address the storage without having to decompress it, buffering the read, remapping, etc... But it will still need quite some work from the devs to exploit it, since it remains storage-class speed. MS worded it a little differently but it sounds like the same thing, they memory map the storage and there's hardware dealing with compression automatically.

Thanks for the correction, I greatly misunderstood what Mr Cerny said.

This does make more sense because you would have thought such a unique storage solution would come with quite a sophisticated asset/package manager/analyser for developers to help tune performance and storage used. To this day, I am still impressed that for many PS4 games you can slot the Blu-ray disc into a virgin console and begin booting the game, before it has fully installed, within 20-30 seconds. I think Sony must have produced good tools to make this happen because in my experience, most PS4 disc-based game installers support it. If this took an inordinate amount of effort, it wouldn't be supported outside of Sony first/second-party games.

Ever since Mr Cerny's influence entered the PlayStation world (and the acquisition of SN Systems), devs have only praised Sony's tools. It started with Vita, then PS4. Most people would have been content getting PS4's time-to-triangle back to PS1 timeframes (1-2 months) but no, PS5's time-to-triangle metric is under a month. Maybe more software developers should be involved in designing the system architecture and influencing the tools design.

Lines could become more blurred if PS5 does not have Quick Resume when we know Series X does.

Last month on resetera Jason Schreier said he'd heard PS5's OS has been designed for games to be as accessible as watching a Netflix movie and Sony call this "Direct Gameplay". A link to the patent about how this words is in the resetera thread.

 

[PSman1700]

Maybe we shouldn’t refer to journalists like jason and links, he was dead wrong on the ps5 specs. Last time linking to devs and sources didnt go so well.
Otherwise theres a ton of sources, devs and journalists incoming