Capcom’s rapid criticism of the price of PlayStation 2; The consoles are too expensive!

Monster Hunter Wilds is one of the best -selling games of the year to make Capcom’s opinion, Tsujimoto Haruhiro, on the PlayStation 5 market position as an important obstacle to the game. If you do not know, in an interview with Nikkei, Tsujimoto recently said that the company has come to the conclusion that the high price of the PlayStation 5 is a major obstacle for consumers, making it difficult to build a popular and wide -ranging series like Hunter Manster because access to the console is limited.

Capcom’s remarkable warning

Tsujimoto’s emotions are not a strange thing, as many industry executives have expressed concern about rising costs and creating obstacles to entering the consul in recent years. However, what is a little surprising is that such a direct criticism of Sony’s hardware and services pricing strategies is publicly expressed in an interview; In particular, an interview with goodness that guarantees to be seen by senior Sony leaders. Game hardware has never been cheap, and it can be argued that when prices are adjusted due to inflation, the initial price of new consoles is really low today. The price of the PlayStation 1, with inflation, was more than $ 5, and for the PlayStation 2 it is about $ 2.

However, over a few years, thanks to a combination of prices and less costly hardware reviews, those consoles became significantly cheaper. The PlayStation 2 was priced at $ 2 a year, but it was only $ 2 in two years and reached $ 2 after four years in the market, half its initial price! In contrast, the PlayStation 5 is now more expensive than the release. The console was priced at $ 5 a year, and although the proposed price of retailers has reached $ 2. Not even a hardware review that provided a thinner version of the Slim console was not accompanied by a decline. Even the digital version of the PlayStation 5 has risen sharply from $ 5 at $ 5 at the time of release, and reports suggest that Sony plans to reduce the capacity of the console’s internal memory.

This change has not happened overnight. The PlayStation 4 also had nothing to do with the widespread price reduction in previous generations, though it was a little cheaper in its lifetime. However, its impact is very important, as the general promise of the console ecosystem for developers, publishers and consumers substantially changes, and it can be said that the construction and supply of some types of games on consoles is not affordable at all. When Tsujimoto expresses Sony’s pricing as an obstacle to the success of Manster Hunter, he speaks of a conscious situation that shows exactly how the series has reached its current situation.

Manster Hunter is a very popular IP in Japan, and outside the country, especially because of World’s success and now Wilds, it is popular with the strong recruitment of teenage players who grew up with Pokémon and chose portable PlayStation versions as something to play with their friends. In the late 1980s, the Hunter Phenester’s phenomenon in Japan was epidemic, and there were at least one table of teenage boys in every shopping malls that destroyed monsters with their portable PlayStation. Of course, it now has significant adult players, but it first gained popularity among teens, and the costly and easy access to the portable PlayStation platform in the final years of his life was a fertile soil where these roots were planted. Now this soil is exposed to complete drying.

Long -term risk for the future of PlayStation

Game consoles that maintain their price year by year and sometimes even have a price increase in their lives are a trend that is very worrying for many publishers. This means that game consoles and partially increased computers, whose hardware costs have increased even more, have come out of the reach of consumers who do not have significant purchasing power, especially children and adolescents. The group has never been the largest consumers, and most of the major users at low -priced second -hand works were in cheaper consoles, but it was the route that the industry used to attract the new generation of players. This method nurtured and developed the next generation of consumers so that you could provide the opportunity to build and develop a collection like Manster Hunter for a wave of high purchasing power and nostalgic memories. Now children and adolescents are turning to smartphones for their game needs, because they are available to them, and the obvious risk for the console business is that if they start playing on mobile, they will probably stay there.

Just as a personal computer that could have been a relatively powerful game device in the 1980s was an obstacle for consoles, now having a powerful smartphone in the pockets of all children and teens is also a big hinder that has grown bigger at the expense of consoles. Reducing TVs is another factor. It was common to have a small TV in the teenage room where they could connect their cheap console, but now the use of television has been reduced due to the expansion of smart devices and reduced TV watching in this age group. This is one of the factors that has reinforced the success of the switch.

Tsujimoto’s praise of the Switch 2 in the same interview is a point that among all the platform owners, Nintendo is probably the only company that is really worried about pricing. This cannot change the reality of the cost of hardware, supply and demand or tariffs, but it is worth noting that Nintendo has made a clear decision to cover part of the Switch 2 cost in Japan to make sure that despite the devaluation of the yen, the market remains affordable. Nintendo is trying to raise software prices, but although consumers may disrupt the new Mario Card, it is more commercially to keep the console affordable, thereby reducing the barriers to the entry and offsetting the cost of the game at a higher price.

For the industry in general, revising how we look at the value of old and inexpensive hardware is one of the most obvious solutions for this problem. Nintendo has accepted this approach with the switch, and there are strong arguments that the Xbox Series X/S Series has been the best strategic move of Microsoft with its hardware in this generation. That Sony has not released a copy of the PlayStation 5 at a similar competitive price, it did not harm it in the first half of the console life cycle, but how it wants to get less eager consumers in the second half without declining prices, there is a very serious question.

The role of cheap hardware in breeding new generation of gamers

Another interesting thing about examining old hardware is the PC market. Comments on the Beltfield 6 beta version showed that a large number of players run on computers that are lower than the minimum requirements that need to be forced to think again how to look at the minimum specifications of the game. With the staggering increase in the price of modern hardware, the value of games that run on old systems will increase. This can mean focusing on games that do well on older hardware, but in the console market, it may mean maintaining support for previous generations for much longer than ever before.

This is especially important for popular games, and the remarkable thing is that a number of fun and simple genres such as dancing, party and rhythmic work have virtually disappeared because console hardware has been out of its high prices. Finally, the publishers and creators of the game can only do something to solve the problem, and the solution to this problem should come from the platform owners. This is a existential threat to Sony in the long run because if children and adolescents today are not involved with PlayStation, it is very unlikely that they will start doing so in the twenties or thirties. The overall philosophy of Sony’s hardware may need to be changed to focus more on being affordable or at least try to balance this need, since PlayStation 5 has been a commercial success, but in pricing, Sony’s strategy for PlayStation and many publishers and developers is clear.

Source: Gameindustry.biz