Picture the scene – after a generation of high prices and selling at a loss, you’ve invested years into R&D, billions into games, tech, marketing and production into creating a solid product at $399. But your fiercest competitor, who has historically been cheaper, is set to reveal their hardware’s price, and the console is running on weaker specs. And then imagine finding out your console is $100 cheaper.
That’s how Sony felt, and it made them ecstatic. Sony’s Scott Rohde, head of Sony Worldwide Studios Software Product Development, told The Verge:
As soon as [the Xbox One’s price] was announced there was running up and down the aisles, “woohoo!”. That’s going to make our announcement that much better.
As for their announcement, he said:
Absolutely great. It was an amazing feeling. Absolutely. We went nuts. We were just like everybody else because this plan has been in place for years. Developing a new console takes a long time. With a goal that was set in motion about three or four years ago, we saw this at the February event about how we talked to all the different developers. You know, what do you like about the PS3, what would you like to see changed, that’s all real. All that happened. Our goal was to build the most powerful console at a price that was affordable and we set that target at $399. All the great engineers in Japan, Mark Cerny was leading all those teams, everything all came together.
The developers said what they wanted, eight gigs of the fastest ram available, all these things that developers wanted, still managed to do that in a machine that was super slick looking and still did it for $399 and that’s why it’s a moment we’re very proud of. That was accentuated when our competitors announced that theirs was $499.
Would you have been able to contain your glee if you were Sony? Sound off below.
[Via]
