The trade war, which started in late 2018 between the two superpowers, could have caused issues in the gaming industry (and it could still happen – who knows how the relationship between them will change?)

Last week, Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, and Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China, have signed the first phase of the trade deal. It means there will be more American exports to China, and there will also be some mechanics for the American products to have their intellectual property safe from China. More importantly, the import tax, that could have been impacting Sony‘s, Microsoft‘s and Nintendo‘s console, will not be implemented!

As the two countries have stricken a deal, the consoles will not have an up to 25% of import tax on them – this was such an issue that brought the three console manufacturers together to send Donald Trump a joint letter. (Because a 25% price hike would have stung.) Trump didn’t reply to the letter, but he first delayed the introduction of this tariff to December 15, 2019, then to a later date, and now, it’s off the table. For now.

The agreement will have a good effect on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox One. Both consoles will use new AMD technology (Ryzen Zen 2-based CPU, Radeon Navi architecture GPU – both under one roof in an APU), plus both Sony and Microsoft will utilise a high-speed SSD to get rid of loading times (and we wrote about rumours about their writing/reading speed and maximum storage space), meaning the two consoles will cost at least 450, or even 500 dollars in the United States. (The Xbox One cost 500 in 2013 because of the Kinect in the bundle. The PlayStation 4 launched with 400.) With Trump’s tariff would push both consoles above 500 dollars. (And then, we didn’t even go into the rumours about the new Nintendo Switch.)

Both consoles will launch this Holiday season.

Source: VentureBeat

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