Another angle on PS5 price from the fiscal report:What about marketing?
Sony made 50bn Yen more profit than Q1 last fiscal year but expect to make the same total profit for the full year, so they expect 50bn Yen (or about $470M) less profit for the remainder of this fiscal year. That's despite a big expected gain in PS+ subs and a stronger looking holiday lineup of titles from third parties this year. Also in that period for FY2019, Death Stranding was the only relatively big game published by Sony. Compare that to the period coming this year with TLOU2 legs, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man MM and probably a couple more bigger titles before April 2021 that we don't know about yet. You can see Sony state an expected operating income increase due to software, so this all makes sense.
The logical conclusion is that Sony are taking a $500M+ hit on hardware sales this fiscal year. On 10M consoles that would be $50+ loss per console, about the same as PS4. No way PS5 is more than $500 if that's anywhere close to being right.
As I analysed before, if $450 BOM is right then Sony would make a ~$30 loss on PS5 at $499 and $110 on PS5d at $399. If they sell equal amounts than an average $70 loss and I think everyone expects the disc version to sell more at launch, so a $50 average loss doesn't seem too far off, and that's probably a minimum estimate.
If you hadn't noticed, this is Forum 2.0
