As we heard from Shuhei Yoshida late last year, when Microsoft made their $499 Xbox One price announcement during E3, people at PlayStation, who were rehearsing for their press conference at the time, “were like, ‘Yahoo!’ We were high-fiving, because there were some rumors, but we really didn’t believe it. We were like, ‘Wow, that’s awesome!’ You know, competition is fun.”
It turns out, high-fiving was just the tip of the iceberg for their celebrating, with PlayStation Software Development Head Scott Rohde telling Ars Technica:
I’m not gonna lie. I remember exactly where I was. We were in press conference rehearsals last year. We had a feeling they were going to come in at $499, but we weren’t sure. So yeah, we were dancing in the aisles and high-fiving. It was great. Anyone that came in on an interview, it didn’t matter what the question was, I could always just answer it with $399. It was the answer to every question.
While Rohde doesn’t have any video evidence of Shuhei Yoshida dancing, he did talk about the PS3’s performance against the Xbox 360 in the previous generation:
We thought we could overcome Microsoft in the previous generation because the first Xbox didn’t have that great market penetration, and PlayStation 2 was so dominant in that era. We wanted a machine in PlayStation 3 that was amazing, that could do everything, and completely misjudged how much the market could bear in terms of price point. Also, coming out a year late, it took us some catch up to get where we needed to be. But we’re proud of where PS3 ended up and how it’s still going strong today.
Rohde also added how Sony “always assumed” Microsoft would release a Kinect-less Xbox One, adding, “So we were waiting for it to a degree, and we were ready for it.”
