Woe to anyone who decided to buy a PS4 yesterday. There must be someone. The rumors and leaks were true -- Sony has dropped the price of its flagship PS4 down to a baseline of $350, bringing it to price parity with Microsoft's Xbox One and setting it up for one of the bigger holiday seasons of the past few years. In some ways, this is a defensive move: Sony couldn't keep selling the PS4 at $50 more than the Xbox One forever. Sony has a massive lead over Microsoft right now, and removing that $350 vs $400 moment of decision between the two helps to cement that lead and continue the console's unencumbered rise. In other ways, it's just the natural progression of a console's life: the price falls after two years. One thing is for certain: Xbox One is going to have a rougher time without its price advantage.
Xbox One still has a much better exclusive lineup this holiday season, and that's not nothing. Sony's wanting for titles in the coming weeks, but Microsoft gets Halo 5: Guardians and the Rise Of The Tomb Raider (which PS4 gets next year, but still), both of which should provide a nice sales bump. Exclusives, however, are not the biggest games in the industry. Multiplatform games have defined the AAA space for a while now, and Sony's dominance offers big benefits even without publishing their own games. In some cases that's fairly straightforward, like how Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will be pushing DLC out to PS4 owners first. In others it's closer to the general advantage provided by a huge install base. If you go over to play a Fallout 4 on a friend's PS4, you're going to associate that game with that console first. And if you've got friends playing Destiny on PSN, you'll want to be able to play with them. For Sony, it means that potential customers are asking themselves not "should I buy a console?" but "should I buy a PS4?" It must feel a little like the salad days of the PS2.
I predict that both the PS4 and Xbox One are going to have very good holiday seasons: a rising tide of top-quality console games lifts all, or at least both, boats. But I don't think that the inevitable November rush is going to do much to shake PS4's dominance on the market, barring some truly exceptional Black Friday deals. Sony has proven that it can hold onto the lead even with a $50 price handicap, and it's only going to do better now that the two consoles are the same price.
We'll really get a taste of just what the future holds for PS4 at some unspecified point in the first half of 2016, when Playstation VR finally hits. It could well be a Playstation Move style dud, or it could become the machine's defining feature. We'll have to see, but if PS4 is actually on track to outsell the PS2, a galvanizing moment like the release of Playstation VR could be just what it needs to gain the momentum necessary to become the best selling console ever.
