The whole 2 sku approach by MS is absolutely to mean Sony cant catch them out.
If sony releases cheap then they have cheap to counter .. if sony releases expensive then they also have a counter.
Both may come to market if theres an advantage.
I don't think there
is an advantage this early on. The weaker SKU will always be the one devs use as the baseline, it's easier to port up than port down, so the weaker next-gen Xbox would always hold back the more powerful one (kinda like how XBO currently does with XBO-X).
If the cheaper option is just gutting the disc drive and lowering the storage, well we kinda already seen with the SAD Edition that doesn't do much to the price. A $299 Scarlett won't do much against a $399 PS5 (assuming PS5 is $399) because early adopters actually care about their physical media and gimping the storage (both in amount and bandwidth) kind of kills the hype around these "revolutionary" SSDs the new systems are supposed to be using.
MS needs to stick to one SKU out of the gate, even if that means the system's $499. By all the rumors, it seems like PS5's gonna be $499 too unless Sony's willing to take the big losses (they don't have the cash reserves to anchor that nearly as well as MS however), so it's just going to come down to who has the best games and most feature-rich experience. And a $299 gimped stop-gap of a wannabe cheap next-gen alternative won't be able to do much of either by comparison to a fully-powered Scarlett or PS5 with simple 1 SKU approaches that aren't cutting storage, disc drives, RAM, or compute capability.
Didn't she also understand how mobile phones work compared to landline phones?
That's ridiculous, considering the fact PS360 also had wireless controllers.
Regarding the average joe, a potential $299 SKU is supposed to target him/her, not us. A cheap next-gen 1080p60 box, no 4K/RT. There are price-conscious consumers that don't care about anything else.
In the long run a 2nd cheaper SKU isn't a bad thing. But the problem is I don't think those average price-conscious consumers make up the bulk of early adopters. Traditionally, they never really have, even for bonafide successes like the PS1 and PS2. Core and hardcore gamers are willing to pay the premiums for better hardware and it's usually about a year or two later you see the prices lower so the console manufacturers can start expanding to more price-conscious types with lower-priced revisions and SKUs.
If anything, because of the digital ecosystems core and hardcore gamers invest in so much these days, companies like Sony and MS make back in profits quicker than back in the day which means it wouldn't even be too long before that type of $299 SKU would be viable or happen. But still, for image/optics and because price-conscious gamers still only make of a minority of early adopters, I think it's better if they do 1 SKU and find ways to price-reduce it over the course of a year or so to bring out cheaper revised units to target more people.
Fake
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