It seems that all the juicy gaming news is breaking over night these days. Coming in the evening hours yesterday, Bloomberg’s Chinese division’s original report stated that due to an unsteady production yield (a concerning 50%) of the console’s custom-designed system-on-chip, Sony has decreased its projected hardware allocation units to 11 million worldwide for the first fiscal quarter.
Supposedly yields are gradually improving, but are still facing problems reaching satisfactory levels of stability. So, what does this potentially mean for Sony and the Playstation 5? A few things.
- Hardware will be scarce and difficult for the average consumer to secure come launch day. This was already suspected after Sony’s imposed e-mail pre-order lottery, but coupled with production issues and hardware stability, it could spell sad times for a lot of fans.
- We know the PS5 was initially developed and intended to launch in 2019, but was then reworked and clocked up once data on the Series X was finally available. This means that the PS5, for all intents and purposes, is a patchwork of software and hardware solutions hurriedly fit together so as not to fall behind the competition.
- They will be as aggressive as they financially can with their pricing to match Microsoft, but undercutting them is just no feasible at this point.
- In a very worst case scenario we might get a delay roughly a few weeks after this weeks Playstation Event and the Tokyo Game Show.
Now, should we be playing a Requiem for the Playstation division and wallowing in all the Doom and Gloom? Not in the least. My personal take is that Sony is going to push forward with tomorrow’s event where we will get a date and pricing (I’m going to sit on $500 for the Standard Edition and $450-$400 for All Digital at best) and we’re going to get a launch date that will fall at least a week or so after the Series X and S. The week of Black Friday sounds about right.
What IS concerning to me is the biggest question; What exactly are we playing on day one? Right now we have Godfall (which can only be pre-ordered on the Epic Game store for now), Spiderman: Miles Morales (no official date, but still slated for Holiday 2020), Bugsnax (Holiday 2020 again), Astro Boy’s Playroom (The only one I can confirm at launch at this time), and a serving of 3rd party games you can view here. There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the PS5’s launch, and if there is more trouble brewing beneath the surface than we are aware of, I’d much prefer for Sony to delay and focus on ironing out all the kinks while building their allocated units in the process.
All told, we should get most of our answers during tomorrow’s presentation. Fingers crossed, people!