Gamescom is sort of like Europe’s version of E3, and while Sony may not have had exactly much in the way of surprises like they did at E3, they still turned some heads during their presentation yesterday. For example, the PS Vita, which for months has languished due to low hardware sales, finally got the price break it needed. From now on, the MSRP is $199, which should help increase its sales numbers by quite a bit. Sony also announced that the Vita’s proprietary memory cards were getting a price break as well on their blog, with 4GB going for $15, 8GB for $20, 16GB for $40, and 32GB for $80.
Of course, that’s not the only big news Sony announced. They announced that the release date for the PS4 will be November 15th in North America, and November 29th elsewhere. If you don’t have a calender on you, those days are Fridays, which means there’s going to be plenty of folks taking those days off, myself included!
Unlike Microsoft, who have had to scale down the number of countries they’re launching in to 13, Sony is going strong and planning on launching in 33 countries. With that many countries getting the console this year, it’s easy to see why the PS4 currently has over 1 million consoles pre-ordered. All in all, Sony has to be feeling really good about where they’re at at this time.
Of course, that now leads to the question about what Microsoft is going to do. Since the PS4 is being released two weeks before Black Friday in the USA, Microsoft could decide to release the Xbox One a week later than the PS4, on or around the 22nd. Then again, it’s very possible that Microsoft could try to one-up Sony by releasing their console a week before. Theoretically, Microsoft could go for a date in the same week as the PS4, but that doesn’t seem really likely. Until Microsoft says something, we just won’t really know for sure.