While Phil Spencer didn’t specify exactly what he meant, it’s easy to guess that he was talking about Sony’s half-generation console update.
Microsoft’s games CEO has appeared in several interviews, and we mentioned both of them the other day (recently, for example, he also talked about how it was good for the Amazon series of Fallout that they didn’t release a game alongside it), but his interview with Bloomberg is a bit longer, and we’ll have to come back to that, although we’ve already mentioned the Xbox handheld and the success of Xbox exclusives on Sony and Nintendo hardware…
“I feel pretty good about where this industry is going. To reach new players, we have to be creative and adapt to new business models, new devices, new ways of access. We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles,” Spencer said. With a bit of exaggeration, they are actually charging $1000 for the PlayStation 5 Pro, plus the vertical stand and the Blu-ray drive…
The PlayStation 5 Pro costs twice as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro, which included a Blu-ray drive but sold the stand separately. Microsoft, meanwhile, has not said whether it will follow the example of the Xbox One X. That console was released a year after the PlayStation 4 Pro, priced at $500, and was capable of more powerful performance compared to Sony’s hardware. The Redmond-based company has already stated that it considers the Xbox Series X to be a mid-generation upgrade, and that it may also have taken into account the increased production costs, and that it may indeed have charged $1,000 for a more powerful console.
Microsoft isn’t really focused on consoles anyway, although they’ve already hinted that the new Xbox will be their biggest leap yet (probably with machine learning). They would rather take a multiplatform and cloud approach.
Source: WCCFTech
