PS5 price ‘will appeal to gamers in light of advanced feature set’

Sony has made the first public comments regarding the PlayStation 5 price, with lead system architect Mark Cerny suggesting the cost “will be appealing to gamers in light of its advanced feature set”.

Earlier this week, the platform holder provided the first official PS5 hardware details in an interview with Wired.

Among other features, Cerny confirmed that the next-gen system will be disc-based and backwards compatible with PS4 games, and that it’ll include an internal SSD and support 8K graphics.

The PS5 price wasn’t mentioned in the article, but its author Peter Rubin did ask Cerny about the cost of the hardware. On Twitter, Rubin posted the following excerpts from the interview.

The top-end PS3 model cost $599 when it launched in November 2006, with the console’s high price point viewed as a key factor in its slow adoption rate during its early years.

The PS4 launched at a much more attractive $399 in November 2013 and has been the runaway leader in terms of current generation console sales, moving some 91.6 million units by the end of 2018.

Elsewhere in the PS5 reveal, Cerny said the console’s SSD is “a true game changer” that’ll dramatically reduce loading times and greatly speed up how quickly environments can be rendered.

And with Sony recently increasing the rollout of PS5 devkits, the console’s lead architect expects studios to come up with plenty of new and interesting ways to make use of its SDD, which was a much requested feature when he canvassed developers.

Cerny told Wired that things like “flying logos at the start of the game and graphic-heavy selection screens, even things like multiplayer lobbies and intentionally detailed loadout processes”, are only present “because you don’t want players just to be waiting”. With PS5, he suggested, they could become a thing of the past.