Zeik

@fourthline: It also happened with digital only games, so I don't believe that logic.

It's anyone's guess what will happen in the future, but I see no reason to believe with what we know right now that things are going to change drastically.

@fourthline: The PS4 commonly had very steep discounts on digital games. Playstation kinda became my personal Steam in the sense that I picked up quite a few games I might not have otherwise just because they were so cheap.

I don't know if I want to pick up a digital only console, as I like the option to buy physical, but last gen I found it was a lot more common to save money buying digital than physical.

@navster15: I personally feel like that's always been the case though. Support for older consoles typically lasts a good couple years after the launch of new consoles (the only exception consoles that were already on deaths door, like the Wii U), sometimes even longer when it comes to smaller studios like Atlus. And it always takes a solid year at least for a decent library to build up.

The only people who buy consoles day 1 are the people who want the new shiny thing asap. They're pretty much never actually worth the price when they launch.

@oursin_360: Not quite what I was hoping for. I don't think notifications will help me much, as I assume I'll have to be refreshing store pages the moment they go live to even have a chance of grabbing one.

If I do miss out I'll probably have to rely on the notifactions though.

@oursin_360: Are they allowing pre-orders anywhere? I was under the impression it was first come first serve everywhere.

I really hope that's not true, because I can't wait until next year to have a working PC. I hope I don't have to downgrade my build dramatically.

@eccentrix: But bagel sandwiches absolutely exist. A plain bagel is not an uncommon sandwich bread substitute.

If they had no intention of price matching and was fully intent on just releasing it at whatever price they had already decided then waiting this long really wouldn't make any sense. There's nothing to be gained in this scenario by waiting until after Microsoft unless they were willing to adjust their pricing to stay competitive.

I obviously can't completely rule out the possibility they'll end up charging more, but if it happens I'm certain the reasoning will be more complex than mere "arrogance". And I don't mean that in a way to defend Sony, it's just not rational.

I really doubt they'll charge more than $499. Their library of games is a good argument for picking Playstation over Xbox when you've got two boxes at the same price point, but when if it's a $100 difference you're definitely going to lose some people on that alone. And I'd say the majority won't pick up both, so they'd more or less lose that person's business for the rest of the generation.

Even if they have to take a loss on the console at $499 that's going to be better for them in the long run if they stay within the Playstation ecosystem. Charging an extra $100 out of the gate would be a very short term business strategy.

Unless I'm underestimating the cost of these consoles and even $599 is a loss and they simply can't afford to go lower. But that seems unlikely.

It seems like their musou games might be moving more and more in this direction. They already did something very similar with Persona 5: Scramble, which is basically the sequel to P5.

And I'm all for it. I'm not entirely against the core gameplay of musou's, but it's just not enough to carry a whole game with little structure or narrative forward movement. Scramble also did a lot to expand well trodden musou mechanics, so I hope that's something that carries forward to this, but with more of a Zelda twist.