This is Microsoft’s reaction to Sony’s announcement of the PS5 and its price hike

Microsoft, as you’d expect, has been closely following Sony’s PS5 reveal. Sony announced the PS5’s full technical specifications in March 2020, which prompted an Xbox executive to provide Xbox chief Phil Spencer and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with a summary of Sony’s console and internal emails from Federal Trade Commission v. Microsoft Unravel the case. Then, more than two years later, Microsoft also reacted to Sony’s PS5 price increase.

Emails appear to show Liz Hamren, former head of platform and hardware engineering at Xbox, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of Sony’s PS5 specifications compared to Microsoft’s Xbox Series PlayStation hardware chief Mark Cerny detailed the PS5’s specifications just two days before Microsoft publicly announced its own Xbox Series

Hamren lists the PS5’s variable GPU and CPU clock rates, “versus us running at higher rates continuous rates.” Hamren admits that Sony has a clear advantage in SSD performance with the PS5:

Cerny spoke at length about the move to SSDs and the benefits for game developers and consumers. They optimized for higher raw throughput (2x ours with slightly better hardware compression and associated performance improvements) rather than the more integrated streaming architecture enabled by Sampler Feedback Streaming.

Elsewhere, the 12 teraflops performance versus the Sony’s 10 teraflops was also briefly discussed. “[Cerny] He stressed that GPU teraflops and CU are not a good measure of performance. “We made the same point with Digital Foundry, but we have a clear performance advantage (12 vs. 10),” Hamrin wrote.

The former Xbox executive also said that Cerny “spent what seemed like a disproportionate amount of time on audio innovations,” but the rest of this discussion was redacted from the email thread. Hammerin also claims that Sony’s expandable storage solution for the PS5 is “actually similar to ours due to its minimum size and speed requirements.” But in reality, Sony’s approach means that consumers can use any regular NVMe SSDs, rather than the proprietary and often more expensive Xbox drives that are only available from Seagate and Western Digital.

In internal emails, Microsoft was also quick to respond to Sony’s PS5 price increase last year – although Xbox prices were not immediately raised. Xbox CFO Tim Stewart sent an email to Xbox chief Spencer and Microsoft CFO Amy Hood early on the morning of Sony’s 2022 announcement, noting that the Xbox team “anticipated this and are quickly moving toward a plan now that we’ve seen confirmation.”

There is discussion in the email thread, which has been heavily redacted, but it appears Spencer wants the company to remain focused on gamers with any price increases. Ami Silverman, who at the time was head of consumer sales and marketing at Microsoft, responded, “All good points, let’s be gamers here because we’re not out of the woods yet… We know this might be our time to gain fans versus lose out on being followers.” “

Silverman clearly points out that Xbox sales are behind PlayStation sales and he doesn’t want to lose any momentum by following Sony’s price rise directly as Microsoft increases Xbox prices. Microsoft has repeatedly mentioned losing the console wars and being in a distant third place during Federal Trade Commission v. Microsoft he heard.

Spencer then explains that he bought the PS5 in August 2022. “Sony bundled the HZD for $50. [additional] “For a while now,” Spencer said. “I bought my PS5 two weeks ago and the only option was the HZD bundle at $549.” HZD incorrectly refers to Horizon Zero Dawn Here, as it were The horizon is forbidden west Which Sony included with the PS5.

This decline may explain why Microsoft delayed the Xbox Series Microsoft increased Xbox Series The price of the updated Xbox Series