Sony apparently delays PS5 price until the Xbox’s is revealed

Sony is apparently waiting to put a price on the PlayStation 5 until the competition comes up with a number — or at least that’s what one of its employees implied. While pricing is a big part of the console wars, it might not be worth the delay considering how many other factors are going to go into the latest round of Xbox vs PlayStation.

During an earnings call this week, Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki spoke about the brand’s rather lackluster Christmas and the costs going into the next generation. The interesting part is this: “What is not very clear or visible is because we are competing in the space, so it’s very difficult to discuss anything about the price at this point of time, and depending upon the price level, we may have to determine the promotion that we are going to deploy and how much costs we are prepared to pay.”

[Read: The new PS5 logo is what it looks like when a company gives up]

Assuming the translation (credit to VGC) is capturing the nuance of what he’s saying, then it sounds an awful lot like Sony is holding the price in reserve until Microsoft says how much the new Xbox is going to cost. Xbox is always the PlayStation’s primary competition (and we already know how much the Switch costs), so I can’t think what else Tokoti would be referring to.

You ever see the Price is Right, and the final person in Contestants’ Row uses the common guessing tactic of adding one dollar to the previous person’s guess? (Newsflash, if you’re one of those contestants: you suck.) This is what this feels like. It’s true that we don’t yet have a price on the Series X, but the Xbox Series X is out there. It’s been revealed, and we have a decent amount of info about it. The fact that we don’t have a price yet has not stopped the hype train from chugging out of the station.

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Hopefully the lack of a price is not what’s stopping the big PS5 reveal, because we the consumers are interested in a lot more than just price. We want to see games. We want to see power. We want to see whether or not this thing has that stupid V shape in the center.

And if I were Microsoft, I would play this game of chicken right until the last minute if I had to. Microsoft was burned last time by the fact that its console was more expensive than the competition (among other failings of the early Xbox One). It also revealed its price first, which just made the PS4 look even better. So I wouldn’t blame the company at all if it waited longer to put a price on its console just to make Sony blink first.

Sony today deployed landing pages for the PS5 on its UK site, offering users a chance to sign up for further updates. Rumor still has it the big reveal is planned for later this month.