The Xbox One price surprised Sony, and us
Sony has suggested that it was ‘surprised’ but pleased by the Xbox One price which will see the Microsoft branded console line-up £80 more expensive than the PS4.
Speaking at E3 2013, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony's head of first-party game studios, suggested that the Japanese gaming giant was pleasantly surprised by a more expensive Xbox One price than it had expected. Since the console’s prices were unveiled earlier this week, the cheaper PS4 has overtaken the Xbox One in Amazon’s pre-order charts.
“I was very surprised about the announcement yesterday by some other company… In a good way,” Yoshida said speaking with CVG.
He added: "Designing PS4 was all about learning lessons from PS3; the system architecture, ease of development, network services and the cost of the system is a big part of it.”
With both manufacturers using their respective E3 press conferences to reveal how much their next-gen gamers will set wannabe owners back, Microsoft confirmed the Xbox One price will be £429 ($499 in the US), while Sony announced the PS4 price will be set at £349 ($399 in the US)
Suggesting that the PS4 had been built around this specific price ambition, Yoshida said: "We always wanted to hit $399 and we designed the system and carefully chose out of all the potential inclusions of the core hardware components and we made a system that we could sell for $399.”
He added: “We just did what we aimed to do and we were hoping that people would like it.”
Despite restricting the console’s hardware to a predetermined price point, Yoshida claimed the PS4 will be more future proof than its predecessor
"In the middle of PS3 we really hit the limit with what we could do on the system side,” the Sony exec stated. “The PS4's enlarged, very fast memory allows us in the future to improve and add more new features. And at the same time we are continuing to invest and add onto the online services so that, three years from now, the PS4 will be much, much better than PS4 this holiday.”
Read More: PS4 vs Xbox One
