Yeah, giving them $500 is really sticking it to them! You going to set your Nikes on fire and smash your Keurig, too?

I think it's a combination of two things:

1. I've heard that Blue ray has legal stuff you have to pay for outside of the hardware, like a licensing fee.

But it's Sony's own licensing, no? It's not like they're paying someone else.

Now I had to look it up... According to a quick google, they own a portion of blue ray.
They are one of 8 of the founders and one of 20 on the board (as of 2016). I don't know if they get still pay the other 6/7 (or 19/20) of the fees to license or not, but as of 2016 the fees were $9.50 for a Blu-ray player, and $14 for a Blu-ray recorder. I doubt the PS5 has a blue ray recorder, so it's really not that much for licensing. But it would account for some of the cost.

2. Just because the disc drive is the only thing they are removing doesn't mean they aren't marking the digital PS5 down just to compete with Xbox.

I 100% think it's almost all of it this. The timing between both showcases suggests, to me, they took this time scrambling to make up for the $300 Series S, probably reprojecting gains and losses with new mark downs.

Yeah, this is where my money is on this but I thought I would bring up other possible money costs

2. Just because the disc drive is the only thing they are removing doesn't mean they aren't marking the digital PS5 down just to compete with Xbox.

This is probably true, but the result is still something that is $100 more expensive if I want to use discs. I am still going to buy every single game I can used as a result.

I mean, sure, but if they hadn't down priced it to compete with the Xbox it would have just been $50 more to use discs. How is that any different if you were planning to buy the $500 dollar version anyway? They weren't ever going to lower that regardless of what the discless costed. In fact if they weren't competing with Xbox they the PS5 would probably be more expensive so that Sony could recoup some of their losses.

So your stand on saying the company is slighting you seems kinda.. odd. Get mad at them for even including an option for discless makes sense, but don't argue the pricing.

This is probably true, but the result is still something that is $100 more expensive if I want to use discs. I am still going to buy every single game I can used as a result.

My guess is that Sony's market research showed that most people are thinking about it the complete opposite way. "Wow, it's $100 cheaper without that thing I don't even use, what a great deal!"

I’ll still end up with both. Sony’s first party games are to good for me to skip. But, like you, my friends are mostly on Xbox. And Game Pass is too good to skip.

But Sony isn’t selling me on getting a PS5 right away.

I only upgraded to the Pro because it came with Spiderman, God Of War, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I won't bother looking up the name of the bundle but I'd like to think it was the "essentials" bundle.

Like sure, if I can buy a kitted out PS5 for the express purpose of playing the few awesome first party games down the line, I can wait to do that.

I want that Series X to make my day to day gaming with friends better.

And this right here exactly sums up the console marketplace right now in my mind. And how I feel like the two consoles have been marketed.

I think my question is "will the Series S be as "Next-Gen" compared to the One X. With so much work being done to avoid next-gen exclusive games, I don't know.

From what I gather, the Series S will be basically the same as the Series X but just target 1080p. I imagine the games will look mostly similar but for the resolutions, some minor gfx setting changes, and perhaps some of the 120fps stuff.

If it weren't discless, and if the dashboard didn't have ads, I would actually have considered it.

The way I see it, everyone is getting a powerful, next gen box. Even the Series S has a much newer CPU and GPU than the older Xboxes. Yes, the Series S is cut back, but it also limits its output to 1440p. It’s a very familiar balancing act. You want your game to run at higher FPS or with higher graphics settings? Dropping the resolution makes that possible. If Microsoft had done the balancing right, that is: if the reduced resolution makes up for the less powerful CPU/GPS, then the Series S will be just as next gen as the PS5 or Series X, at a much lower price.

I think my question is "will the Series S be as "Next-Gen" compared to the One X. With so much work being done to avoid next-gen exclusive games, I don't know.

Absolutely, it will.

Ignore this cross-gen phase. It happened last time too. I have Assassins' Creed: Black Flag in my game library twice. Once for the Xbox 360 version and once for the Xbox One version. The Xbox One version is a little prettier, but the gameplay is the same. Ultimately, studios can't sit idle for years waiting for a next generation to arrive. They have people to pay and rent to keep up with and so on. That's true of this time too. Look at Horizon: Forbidden West getting a PS4 version. It's almost certainly because development on it started long before the team even had access to PS5 development kits. We see the same with Halo Infinite, on Microsoft's side.

But, things are also different this time. Going from the Xbox / PS2, Xbox 360 / PS3, and Xbox One / PS4, the core components of the consoles have remained more or less the same. Oh, sure, the CPUs and GPUs got more powerful, but the storage, in particular, stayed slow. Over time we moved from playing straight off the game disc to installing on a hard drive, but until now all the storage mediums have been vastly slower than the rest of the consoles.

That changes majorly with the SSDs in the PS5 and the Microsoft Series consoles. SSDs provide both vastly faster total throughput, and vastly faster access times than either CD/DVD or HDDs did during the past two decades. Sony hasn't talked much about their core system software, but look at what Microsoft is showing. Even Xbox One games that know nothing about next generation will load some 5x faster. On top of that, Microsoft (and probably Sony too) can now use some neat trickery to store an entire game state on the SSD letting you switch from game to game to game far faster than any PS4 or Xbox One can even load one game. It's going to feel amazing!

There's also a bunch of very neat optimizations Microsoft is making specifically to support their two console approach. Things like where they'll now be able to only fetch the parts of texture the game is actually showing instead of loading the full texture when half of it won't even be shown on screen. There are things like that where Microsoft is claiming a 2x next gen performance advantage vs the way things are done on the Xbox One X.

I actually think the Series S is kinda brilliant. You get all the stuff that will really define this next gen. The fast ssd, the new graphics tech. The new graphics and storage APIs that multiply the effectiveness of the console vs the previous gen ways of doing things. Unless Microsoft badly misbalanced that resolution vs GPU equation I talked about last time, the Series S should feel almost exactly the same as a Series X, it just won't output as many pixels. And that's not much of a problem, anyway. Games look great today using all sorts of tricks that involve not outputting a full 4K pixels.

So, short term, the Series S is gonna blow the Xbox One X away in terms of feel. Things will be more fluid. Games will load vastly faster. Fast game switching will become something we can't believe we lived without. And in the long term, the Series S should hang neck and neck with the Series X. Everything from enemy count to draw distance to effects clarity should be almost identical... it's just the Series S is really meant for people with smaller TVs that were going to be displaying fewer pixels anyway.

All that said, I totally empathize. As someone who loves getting the best possible version of a movie, I fear the day companies decide it's not profitable enough to make physical copies of movies.

The issue for me is ownership. Like it or not, even in a world with no physical discs, you can still 'own' a copy of a movie if you get a pirated copy. You can save that, keep it forever, and play it wherever and whenever you want. It'll probably be a lower quality version ripped from streaming, but you can still have something that nobody can control your access to.

Games are different. Consoles are locked down. You can't have free unrestricted access to a game without physical media. On PC, you have options like GOG that give you the game with no restrictions. You can save them, and play them whenever wherever. You can't do that on a console.

The elimination of physical media for game consoles necessarily means sacrificing your ability to play whatever game you want, when you want. Especially with game pass… if a game is pulled? Bye. You're not playing it.

When a game leaves the Xbox Game Pass library, you won't be able to play it any longer, even if it's downloaded to your console.

Digital downloads are similarly controlled and can leave you unable to play a game you paid for.

There is no way around this like with a movie or music since the consoles are locked down.

This isn't true, at least on the Xbox side. There are no Game Pass exclusives. Everything can be purchased separately, and they even encourage you to do so with the Game Pass member discount.

Purchase digitally. Would a retailer give you the discount on a physical copy? They are incentivizing you to not have a disc.

On SX you can put in your OGX discs from 2001 and play your games just fine on the new hardware*, or you can get a digital copy. The choice is yours.

The backward compatibility going from Xbox One all the way back to the original Xbox is one of the things that really stands out for the Xbox platform. I will give them that.