It’s going to be a big holiday season for Sony as the company releases two big pieces of hardware – the PS VR and the PS4 Pro.
Both seem to be reviewing well and it’s clear that a lot of time and effort went into ironing out the kinks and ensuring a smooth launch.
There’s only one problem – with Project Scorpio only releasing in Holiday 2017, the PS4 Pro and PS VR’s biggest competition is each other.
As Forbes’ Paul Tassi posits:
You like video games. You have $400-500 to spend. Do you:
• Buy PlayStation VR, which represents an entirely new way to play games that you’ve likely never experienced before?
• Or do you buy PS4 Pro, the high-performance version of a successful, traditional home console?
Of course, one could argue that “I was never going to buy a PS VR/PS4 Pro any way”, but the fact of the matter is, if only one was releasing this year that’s the only option consumers would have.
This isn’t helped by the fact that both pieces of tech are relatively hard sells to begin with, the PS4 Pro doing everything your current PS4 can and PS VR being an unknown quantity to the average consumer.
We’re sure both of PlayStation’s new releases are going to do well, but we can’t help but feel if they had released one at a time, they could’ve done much better.
“Essentially the choice this holiday is whether a marginal improvement in console tech is better than a brand new, albeit risky way to play,” says Tassi.
“I have a hunch it’s going to be PS4 Pro that’s the larger success story for Sony, but it will take some time to figure out if that’s the case.”
