The PS5’s launch appears to be a smashing success thus far, with consoles immediately selling out left and right, but that hasn’t stopped Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO and President from making controversial statements that even die-hard PlayStation fans might have trouble agreeing with.
In a new interview with The Telegraph pertaining to the PS5’s UK launch, Jim Ryan was asked whether Sony’s decision to price its premium titles at $69.99 was fair. The executive responded positively, noting that the increase is justified based on the amount of entertainment that modern games provide.
“Yes, yes, I do,” Ryan stated. “If you measure the hours of entertainment provided by a video game, such as Demon’s Souls compared to any other form of entertainment, I think that’s a very straightforward comparison to draw.”
What this tells us is that future first-party blockbusters (e.g., God of War: Ragnarok) will almost definitely cost $69.99, but Ryan, at the very least, goes on to pour cold water on those recent rumors about Sony considering an even higher price point.
“I can say that that report that we were considering higher prices for first party games is categorically false,” Ryan clarified in response to last week’s Bloomberg article.
Another contentious subject that The Telegraph touched upon was the PlayStation 5’s 825 GB SSD, which only comprises 667 GB of usable storage. Despite the fact that “Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War takes up almost one fifth of that on its own,” Ryan claimed that he has heard no complaints about the relatively low amount of storage space.
“We’re not hearing that,” he said. “We’ll obviously watch what happens as people unbox their PlayStations and start to use them. We think we’ll be okay. We obviously are able to monitor hard drive usage on the PS4 microscopically and everything that we saw there indicates that we should be fine.”
While this is arguably a non-issue thanks to the PS5’s internal M.2 SSD slot, which allows users to easily upgrade their storage, Sony, strangely, hasn’t even enabled the feature yet nor provided a list of officially supported NVMe SSDs.