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

Rangers said:
Yup. Against a 399 or at most 449 PS5 DE? And a 299 Switch? Almost noone will buy this. I'd say I could see a place for it for kids as a cheap fortnight/minecraft/overwatch box, but A) Switch (which is much more attractive to the general populace than "XBox" if you're spending 299) B) why not buy a Xbox One for 199 at Christmas (if they were still available anyway) if that was your purpose?

Lockhart was always a bad idea. It only sounds good in theory, until you start thinking it through. There's no value inherent in the idea because the cost savings of a very slightly smaller SOC just dont amount to much. And besides that power is such an overwhelmingly dominant factor in core gaming. Allowing for $50 for the optical disk, there's effectively $150 difference between this and Series X.

Microsoft is so dumb sometimes, they engineer the winning hand and then set it up for Sony to make them look stupid. Which will be called a 399 PS5 DE, Lockhart will be the laughingstock of the forums across the interwebs if/when that's announced. Hmm, for $100 more I can get the ballyhood Sony exclusives and a real full fat next gen console.

I would have really liked MS position this coming Gen if they just had Series X. As is, they stand a real risk of ruining it all. People are going to be confused and theyre just going to shrug and buy PS5....further we saw with One X how the lower spec hardware is such an anchor. I love my One X, but never remotely felt like I was getting any kind of transcendent experience that 5X the flops should have afforded. One X literally could have passed for a new gen in specs, it was ~as great a flop multiplier as PS4 to PS5 is.

I just hope XSS dies quickly, the good news is I cant see how that isn't likely.
Click to expand...
XSS gives you future proofing as well as significantly better performance over 200 XBOs, that’s why people will buy it.

We really need to see the games before writing it off - XSX vs XSS, what makes it worth 200 more!?
 
TeamGhobad said:
if true Sony just checkmated xbox

https://twitter.com/x/status/1303267113658974208
Click to expand...

Just as a point of accuracy, but I find it a bit odd when people declare the PS5 as 10.28 TF (4 S.F, 2 D.P.) but neglect to mention that's simply its max boost clock, and then in the same sentence declare the XSX as 12 TF (only 2 S.F, and zero D.P) in order to remove some of its perceived performance.

Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. The three points that make up the Bermuda Triangle of hot takes.
 
I post this is a 'box thread but should have done it here: Xbox played a blinder following the Series S picture leak. A good meme follow by putting an offical picture and price out there. They're having a good next gen publicity day for the first time in what feels like ages.

Lots of comments out there on the price that amount to "Might as well get one". It very early days but seem like MS have made a good move with their less powerful, but fully featured, cheepoBox.
 
Last edited:
Yeah I posted in the Lockhart thread but how would the Series S compare to the X1X which touts 4K gaming?

Series S is $299 but with $70 games in 1080p while X1X has $60 games which are 4k?

Or won't matter, Series S games upscaled by TVs to 4K will be fine?
 
wco81 said:
Yeah I posted in the Lockhart thread but how would the Series S compare to the X1X which touts 4K gaming?

Series S is $299 but with $70 games in 1080p while X1X has $60 games which are 4k?

Or won't matter, Series S games upscaled by TVs to 4K will be fine?
Click to expand...
Oh...

right.

The S series is not meant to be driving 4K.
The X series is meant to be driving 4K.

The upgrade path is for the type of television set you have. But the Series S also has a 4K upscaler, which we could use some more details on for the sake of discussion.
 
wco81 said:
Yeah I posted in the Lockhart thread but how would the Series S compare to the X1X which touts 4K gaming?

Series S is $299 but with $70 games in 1080p while X1X has $60 games which are 4k?

Or won't matter, Series S games upscaled by TVs to 4K will be fine?
Click to expand...

Series S has a FLOPS number disadvantage, but that doesn't take into account improvements in GPU architecture efficiency.

Beyond that, as a machine the Series S is significantly more powerful than the XBO-X in everything except GPU FLOPs count.

This is especially true of you believe the next gen hardware hype coming out of MS and Sony. IE - SSD, CPU, 3D hardware accelerated audio and modeling, RT, etc. etc.

XBO-X likely wouldn't be able to handle games targetting this generation well due to lacking in many areas compared to PS5, XBSX, and XBSS. You'd have to scale down asset quality (it doesn't have an SSD), audio quality, and anything that uses the CPU heavily.

You could still scale things down to run on it (look at how current gen games can get scaled to NSW which is a much larger hardware disparity, for example). But you'd have to scale them down significantly more than you would with the XBSS.

Regards,
SB
 
We will see though if the all-you-can-eat model works for gaming as it does for TV shows and movies.

Enough to get tens of millions subscribing year after year?
 
Rangers said:
Yup. Against a 399 or at most 449 PS5 DE? And a 299 Switch? Almost noone will buy this. I'd say I could see a place for it for kids as a cheap fortnight/minecraft/overwatch box, but A) Switch (which is much more attractive to the general populace than "XBox" if you're spending 299) B) why not buy a Xbox One for 199 at Christmas (if they were still available anyway) if that was your purpose?

Lockhart was always a bad idea. It only sounds good in theory, until you start thinking it through. There's no value inherent in the idea because the cost savings of a very slightly smaller SOC just dont amount to much. And besides that power is such an overwhelmingly dominant factor in core gaming. Allowing for $50 for the optical disk, there's effectively $150 difference between this and Series X.

Microsoft is so dumb sometimes, they engineer the winning hand and then set it up for Sony to make them look stupid. Which will be called a 399 PS5 DE, Lockhart will be the laughingstock of the forums across the interwebs if/when that's announced. Hmm, for $100 more I can get the ballyhood Sony exclusives and a real full fat next gen console.

I would have really liked MS position this coming Gen if they just had Series X. As is, they stand a real risk of ruining it all. People are going to be confused and theyre just going to shrug and buy PS5....further we saw with One X how the lower spec hardware is such an anchor. I love my One X, but never remotely felt like I was getting any kind of transcendent experience that 5X the flops should have afforded. One X literally could have passed for a new gen in specs, it was ~as great a flop multiplier as PS4 to PS5 is.

I just hope XSS dies quickly, the good news is I cant see how that isn't likely.
Click to expand...
I don't think Sony can sell the DE PS5 at 400 without taking a massive loss on each system. Removing the disc drive doesn't save that much money. I will be very surprised if the DE is more than 50 less than the full model and if the full model comes it in at less than 500.

The XSS has less ram and a smaller SSD, generates less heat and needs less cooling and is much smaller than the other consoles. It's definitely cheaper to make and ship than either the XSX or PS5. And it's targeting a different resolution, where the things it's weaker at scale with resolution. So it'll give similar IQ and perf as the XSX but with lower resolution, which if you're still on a 1080p TV is all you need. To note, still has a better cpu than the PS5.

And you know that the Xbox One S and the Xbox One X had basically the same CPU right? And that last gen was heavily CPU limited? The X had much more consistent frame rates and better resolution; sub 1080p to 4k is more than 4x the pixels. That's where most of your extra power goes. It wasn't going to significantly change games though, either in gameplay or IQ improvements. It was the same architecture and had the same platform limitations. FLOPS don't work like that as a measure.

And no one seemed to be confused by the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, so I'm not sure why they'd suddenly start being. They're even looking like they're going to slot into the same price points.
 
zed said:
yeah 1.5 billion is just every PC out there with a decent GPU in it.
for a more accurate number look at the current amount of ppl playing said game on each of the platforms at any time IIRC consoles always outnumber PC by a lot, though PC gamers have more titles to choose from but even taking this into consideration the 1.5 billion number is a gross exageration
Click to expand...

A decent GPU, atleast 2012 CPU/GPU level, or say ballpark? Guess the majority of console gamers are on that kind of hardware for a while to come. Theres still many 360/PS3 users even.

Depends on what game, im sure fornite, apex, pubg, gtav has more pc players then say the PS4, BF4/5 has more pc players then playstation or xbox. If you talk about CoD and certain singleplayer games, yes they sell more on a console perhaps. So yes there are more pc gamers out there then console gamers, they just have different tastes of games to play.

I have to add, it also depends how you compare, if you combine PS, Xbox and Switch against the pc then yes. But thats three different platforms versus one.
The 1.5b number probably isn't a lie, no idea how they calculate that, but one thing is certain, the pc gaming market is bigger then a singular console platform, probably even bigger then the above three mentioned together. And with MS/XBOX/GamePass this won't decrease any time soon i think.

If you want to throw candy crush in the mix (no idea if NV has done that, theres alot of CS players etc too), then we can say most console players most likely play fifa, nhl, cod and gta. Heavy exclusives amount for about 10% of the total install base.
 
Thanks to @Lalaland for pointing out Microsoft has confirmed the Xbox Series X release date November 10 2020, the estimated price of $499, and specified preorder date of September 22, 2020.

So that is officially Microsoft's approach, go for affordability and go for performance.

It is now open for Sony to let us know what their approach will be.
 
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