Same price, less storage. Shrinkflation at its finest.
Sony plans to release a new PS5 Slim All-Digital console with an 825GB SSD, reducing storage from the previous 1TB to optimize production costs amid rising expenses. The PS5 Slim Standard with a disc drive will retain the 1TB SSD, and the updated model is expected to launch in Europe first.
Fucking shrinkflation coming to electronics? Damn.
Just consoles! You can still prowl ebay for computer parts and build something basically just as good for like 200 bucks.
As good as PS5 for $200? Yeah, no.
To be clear, I’m not saying “as powerful” when I say “as good.” A cheap old gaming PC can already play about 90% of games ever released, so why would I care about the AAA games from the last 5 years that demand newer hardware for no real reason? Terraria, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Minecraft, Cuphead, saints row 3, half life 2, portal 2, DOOM (1990s original games with mods), Crysis, Shovel Knight, etc. all have cheap as hell minimum requirements and look great. I won an auction for a laptop for 100 bucks (65 including my bid and shipping, though the charger was another 20, and the setup from scratch would include the price of mouse i used to about 100 bucks altogether) off Ebay that could play all the games listed above (except for skyrim, fo4, and maybe cuphead cause I didn’t test that game. It ran Crysis on low settings surprisingly well.)
I thought most equivelant gpus to the ps5 start around $200 on their own.
Where we’re going we don’t need equivalent gpus
terraria music begins playing
Given that baltoro, monster train, and now silk song have been my most played games recently, you might be on to something.
You may be able to get a used 3070 for around $200. That doesn’t include the rest of the computer though.
What the fuck are we even doing at this point, as a society?
Transistors aren’t getting cheaper, and the industry doesn’t know how to deal with that. They’re still in the mindset that Moore’s Law has continued and will continue.
Then some clown convinced a bunch of people that he should be in charge of things, and he thought tariffs were a valid economic tool.
Dealing with knock on effects of a vindictive rapist trying to dismantle the global economy because he lost a popularity contest. Possibly at the behest of his russian handlers who want to fill the power gap.
And its gonna get a whole lot worse.
He’s a symptom more than a cause. This isn’t a recent development, just a recent escalation.
It’s post-capitalism. Capitalism was only ever capable of bringing about merit based class mobility and prosperity temporarily before the sociopaths all trickled to the top over the decades and then shut that shit down. Neo-feudalism is the inevitable result, and that will eventually be dismantled by another working class revolution.
All economies have lifespans.
TBH I’d just say were seeing capitalism approach its final inevitable form.
That’s essentially what I’m saying. It will always end up this way. Whether we call it late stage or post capitalism or just capitalism is irrelevant. It’s a system that empowers sociopathy and sociopaths will always choose to enrich themselves at the expense of the country and it’s citizens.
Yeah, wasn’t disagreeing with you. Capitalism is a fundamentally unsustainable system, it’s always going to eventually metastasise into a situation where a very few control almost all of the resources and the vast majority are desperate and impoverished. There might be meritocratic aspects to it in its early stages, but later on skills, talents and hard work won’t get you shit unless you’re rich.
The hard times are coming, so we’ll have to be hardened.
the snake is eating its tail. but ppl won’t rise up until they are literally dying.
so do what you can in your own life to mitigate these impacts on you and yours.
This is really insightful and very good advice
It fucking sucks how much this point illustrates the reality of this time. But it’s upsettingly accurate
This is just classic shrinkflation. Your bottle of shampoo comes in 32 ounces, they shrink it to 24 ounces without changing the price, then later they come out with 32 ounce bottles again with a higher price and a sticker that says, “Now with 33% more!” to make it seem like they’re giving you so much shampoo; and then the cycle repeats.
No, it’s not. Consoles (and technology in general) historically trend cheaper over time. Demand lowers, manufacturing cost lowers, newer tech releases, costs adjust to accommodate.
It’s very abnormal that the current gen of consoles has not only not gotten cheaper yet, but has actually raisen in price. Like, very very abnormal.
Shrinkflation is a real thing, but historically it has nothing to do with consoles.
Source: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/how-low-will-the-price-of-ps4-go.1520289/
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/are-the-ps4-and-xbox-one-really-that-expensive-historically/
Yes, but Moore’s Law has broken down, and the things that used to allow for consoles to get cheaper over time, via new revisions, are not holding true anymore. So in lieu of those things, we’ve got classic shrinkflation.
A 1TB SSD is 60€. In a shop.
They’re like cheaping out 6 bucks here
Sure, on already thin margins (I don’t remember if PS5 is sold at a loss, but Xbox is), multiplied by millions more units.
PS5 is supposedly no longer sold at a loss.
That said, the margin per console is probably not good enough for their required profit growth, hence this.
In addition to what others have said about Moore’s Law slowing down, there’s also just the fact that console generations themselves are slower. The cheapest price cuts on old consoles were fire sale prices to clear out old stock when they were on their way out. Even though the PS5 has been on the market for about as long, it still feels like the generation is only beginning, we won’t be talking about PS6 for a long time yet.
Node shrinks drove a lot of this. Those have stopped being such large leaps.
Normally yes, but might as well blame it on something and raise the prices while everyone else.
I have a theory.
None of this is real. It’s a simulation thats been abandoned. And now, all the errors are compounding.
I think it’s more that we have fewer and fewer small companies or competition. So price rises don’t deter consumers as much as they should, by allowing competition.
You can set up a restaurant as a person with financing. But the costs of doing so, fighting against economies of scale of larger outfits are incredibly difficult, but only the best survive.
Creating a console. Not even super wealthy corporations can successfully do that with billions of dollars and teams of experts. So if one is successful, like PlayStation, there is no reason to lower prices. There is no valid competitor.
Similar for many things. Amazon. Sure you can shop elsewhere but it won’t have the range or shipping logistics. Same with apple and android. Duopoly instead of monopoly. Nvidia. Monopoly. Facebook. Monopoly. Google, monopoly. Etc etc
Our economies are broken. It’s become about lock in rather than competition. It was gradual and innocuous at first. Tie that in with enshittification and shrinkflation and we have an ever shrinking shit sandwich with no alternative.
Stagnation ahead of a major societal shift?
🤔 The PS5 is 5 years old. I’ll pass.
Digital only with reduced space? What’s the worst that could happen? 🤔
“Buy a bigger SSD!”
I guess just be glad they’re not pulling a Microsoft where you’d have to buy a propriety NVMe drive.
You referring to the expansion drives that slot in the back and are hotswappable? Most expensive storage medium I’ve ever bought. Problem was, there was no alternative… Internal storage ignored, ofc
You always were able to use a standard external drive. Yeah, the speed was slower, but you weren’t forced to buy the expansion card.
Current gen games can’t be played from standard external storage. You could put the game there, but it would have to be moved to internal memory to play it.
BC games would work fine, but not current gen.
Applies to both PS5 and Xbox both.
Are you able to expand the PS5’s storage with just a normal USB 3.0 drive?
You can, but you can’t play games from it, it would be storage only. You’d have to move it to internal memory to play it.
Okay, so isn’t that exactly the same situation as the Xbox, but then the Xbox gives you the additional option to actually expand the hot storage?
Yup. On the PS5, you can add standard M2 storage to increase the usable internal space.
On the Xbox you have to use the Seagate or WD plug.
Only for backwards compatibility titles. PS5 titles have to be run off of either the integrated storage or an M.2 SSD.
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Oh no, the SSD is soldered to the motherboard.
Though this is probably unlikely, I wouldn’t actually be surprised.
The SSD has been soldered to the motherboard on previous models as well. The nvme slot is for adding a second SSD, it’s not populated from the factory
No, the PS5 has a standard expansion slot.
its weird cause the UHD player is probably what i use the most on my PS5
How many games are y’all installing at once? 825GB is plenty. You can have three 200GB games installed, plus 3 or 4 AAA games with more reasonable disk usage.
Sound more like one game if you are a CoD player.
CoD players don’t play other games anyway.
Not the freaking point but okay.
Those 200gb games take a while to download, even on a gigabit internet connection.
825GB is the raw space, not usable space.
You lose some to formatting and file structure, you lose more to system reserved space for updates and what not.
Out of the box, a 1 TB PS5 has 848 GB available.
So if you’re starting with 825 GB that means you’re likely to only have, what? 700 GB free? Less?
Some games push 100 GB, so max of 7 of those not counting DLC and what not?
Don’t forget that the OS is on there too taking up space and from reports it’s about 160 GB on its own.
The OS is 160 GB? That seems unrealistic. Windows 11 is bloated AF and is less than 30 GB.
What could an OS running on fixed hardware have that requires 160 GB?
I think that’s a bit too big to be just the OS, they have like 50GB of built-in stuff (share factory+astro but you can uninstall both). It’s probably something sensible like 60GB but they’re playing it safe by doubling the reserved space. It’s Sony after all
You lose some because 825GB refers to 825.000.000.000 bytes, divide by 1024 (bytes in KB) and you get 768GB usable space. In the early days of ps5 there was 667GB left over after OS and stuff
I have a four TB SSD installed in my PS5 and I wish I had more.
I like to play what I want without waiting for a download.
Just put the disc in and shut the lid. I don’t know what these downloads people are talking about are
Hell yeah. We should be boycotting them for taking our physical media, because it breeds complacency and that’s how they steal from us. You will own nothing and eat bugs.
I mean… you can still use physical media for games, just prepare for it to be awfully slow unless it’s like a tiny indie game or something low-fi. As for the console makers, they still offer non-digital models. Idk who’s “they” in this instance.
edit: even better, it was pointed out to me it doesn’t have to be slow if you copy the contents of a disc to internal space
I agree, but being that you can buy a 256gb SSD from Walmart for $17.99, I’d like to see a new complete game purchase at $67.99 that you just plug the SSD into the top of the console and press a button to turn it on. SSD loads and has the entire contents of a completed game without need for internet access. If it doesn’t work, they didn’t ship a complete game and should be liable for refunding/replacing the product you bought from them.
Sure they are sata drives, but you really shouldn’t need something faster to play a game, as everything can go to the consoles RAM/GPU’s memory and then store back to the drives, meaning they could cut internal storage if needed as well. Stick the drives in cases, put on your games rack. Id like it. Maybe I’m not the main demographic though.
No longer play a game, sell it… Or format the drive and recycle it for another use.
So, back to cartridges. Honestly I’d be totally fine with that- but the issue isn’t quite with my end. Some game is made, and is sold for $70. A disc costs under a dollar to produce. A cart is significantly more, and digital is just paying upkeep on a server. Digital has the highest profit margin, and carts the lowest. Discs are great for physical distribution.
That said, I would totally love collector editions in the form of a figurine with storage media built in.
You can still get modern games on a bluray, but people started valuing convenience in the moment over everything else. That’s why digital-only consoles got so huge, on top of being cheaper.
Even with the PS4, the bluray couldn’t play the game.
It had to install to the internal drive and download updates
Makes sense, blurays are at like 50MB/s read, at least you could keep the disc and share it
Downloads have been a thing for a couple years now.
You can fit maybe 5 games at 100 GBs a piece (which is pretty standard for PS5) on an 825 GB drive, not to mention that you have to leave up to 100 GB overhead just to update certain games plus room for the OS. If you have a family then you literally have a situation like mine where I have 1 game installed to the PS5 and Warzone, Fortnite, Roblox, Rocket League, Fall Guys, and Marvel Rivals take up the rest of the console storage space
That’s the way I play. Like 2-4 games max on my storage. Each one is a different genre, I play it until I finish then uninstall and move on to next game.
I usually have 10-20 on my PC and Steam Deck. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for the 2-3 games I’m playing through, but one of my favorites sounds fun.
PlayStation only went downwards since the PlayStation 3 change my mind
PS3 was dope I loved it, but I had a huge problem when they removed the Other OS option.
All my homies hate having to pay for online services
Can’t; you are objectively correct.
Although I don’t hate my PS5 (it’s the only console i still use), I do think the launch PS3 was peak Playstation. Yeah, it did have a “Homer car” vibe to it by including everything and the kitchen sink, but it was truly amazing.
Is 825GB a common size? Is there any logic to where that being picked came from?
Theory 1: Because it is cheaper to manufacture.
Theory 2: It is custom made for the PS5’s internal 12 data channels, allowing for faster read/write than normal.They
buymake storage with 12 channels, and 1 Toshiba NAND chip @ 512Gib per channel. This means each SSD has 768GiB of storage, or 825GB. The max read bandwidth is 9GB/s.
math: 512Gib x 12ch = 6144Gib / 8 = 768GiBFor reference the Samsung 990 Pro 1TB has 8 channels, and 2 Samsung NAND chips @ 500Gb per channel. This means each SSD has 932GiB of storage, or 1,000GB. The max read bandwidth is 7.5GB/s.
math: (converted to Gib for uniformity) 466Gib x 2 chips = 932Gib x 8ch = 7456Gib / 8 = 932GiBKey:
Gib = gibibit, 1024⁴ bits
GiB = gibibyte, giga/binary/byte, 1024⁴ x 8 bits
GB = gigabyte, giga(decimal)byte, 1000⁴ x 8 bitsExtra: Storage-based measurements are largely measured in binary bytes but displayed with the decimal abbreviation, hence my C: drive here was sold as 500GB, equal to 465GiB but Windows shows it as 465GB
Shareholder value vs executive bonus calculation.
Nope.
512+256=768, 768+64=832… minus 7 for system data and general overhead maybe? That’s my best guess, but that’s a really odd size.
Assuming it’s 768GiB, then it would be 824.6GB, not 832GB.
Maybe some overprovisioning for the SSD. But to be honest, I’m not sure
the ps5 is the console I used the least. And I bought the ps3 in the middle of the ps4’s generation.
I’m waiting for PS1 but priced like PS5 and called remaster.
Fuck Sony for making Europe pay for America’s stupidy. And Microsoft, I think they’re doing it too.
I mean it honestly looks more like a corporation using US tariffs for cover than being directly affecting it like the article was speculating.
I mean we’ll have a better idea when the price is released in the US markets since current US prices for PS 5s have already increased for the US only.
America’s stupidity doesn’t account for all of it. Sony would love to get more PS5s in homes at lower entry prices if they could.
So pretty much 2-3 games like baldurs gate, helldivers, GTA V after accounting for the OS, with no ability for physical games. Idk who would buy this with that knowledge… it makes the disc version the only viable choice for a bit more coin
It’s actually really easy to add an nvme drive. That’s more costs though, obv
Is it currently possible to background transfer a game install from external HDD to SSD while playing a game? As far as I recall the PS5 did not allow that early into the system’s launch.
Not to simp for Sony, but if it is possible then I don’t think NVMe disk space is a massive issue. The system at least has a 10gbps usb-c port for external drive transfer.
Unless you want to manually transfer every game ahead of when you want to play it, it is very much a massive issue to play games designed with nvme storage in mind on an SSD, let alone an HDD.
And that is assuming it will even launch.
And even the manual shuffling becomes a problem as the consoles tend to be very picky about how much space you have and how much buffer they want before they’ll start a transfer. Ask any of us who had a lot of games installed on the PS4…
