If we are taking Amazon sales to be an indicator of quality of life for sales, it looks like PlayStation Classic may be in some trouble. Less than three weeks after the launch of the PlayStation Classic, retailer Amazon has dropped the price from the MSRP of $100 by nearly a third — in other words, you can grab the hardware now for $69.95, if you are so inclined.
Up to now, we have only seen anecdotal or regional. For instance, we found at that one of the regions we expected the console to do best in — Japan — had a fairly weak opening week for the hardware. More specifically, the Media Creates pointed to only 130,000 units being sold. In retrospect, this is less than a third of what PlayStation Classic’s most significant competitor (the SNES Classic) sold in the same amount of time.
Anecdotally, the PlayStation Classic seems to be keeping its real estate at major retailers, despite anticipated holiday sales foot traffic. This has led to some funny pictures, though impossible to correspond with actual sales figures:
This “Only buy ONE PlayStation Classic” sign really seems like it should have said “Please buy a PlayStation Classic. No one else is and we really need to clear these shelves!!” pic.twitter.com/XuRCEgITXx
— DreamcastGuy (@DreamcastGuy) December 5, 2018
However, this is where Amazon and their sales step in as a useful barometer of success. Using Amazon price tracker CamelCamelCamel, the historical data is telling a tale of struggle:
Following the release on December 3rd, you may note that we only see Amazon’s price (the green line) drastically falling. Around December 16th, the price goes down by 25% with a new price of $74.95. Only a week after that do we see the new price ebb in at $69.95.
This also has impacted the third-party sellers as well, with likely scalpers getting burned by the decline in popularity. While the game was retailing at nearly $150 pre-launch with people sitting on pre-orders, that number has plummeted since. Specifically, the drop is around 56% from the all-time highs.
Doing a similar comparison of the NES Classic Edition (the hardware PlayStation based this on) yields wildly different results:
There are a few things to glean from these charts:
- Nintendo’s NES Classic has struggled to stay in active stock — so much so that the Amazon data on it is too limited to even be viewed.
- It is such a hot commodity to this day that third-party retailers are still listing at $98.00 and $145.00 on average, 1.5 and 2.5 times the harware’s MSRP.
Of course, it is fair to say this is still in the camp of speculation — there is no way to tell exactly how well any product is doing by sales alone (especially if we can chock it up to “holiday discounts”). However, there is more than enough smoke to be pointing to a fire.
Outside of the sales data, there is more than enough bad news being handed to the PlayStation Classic. There was a surprisingly easy way to access the game’s emulator settings, which YouTubers discovered in the first few days. Many critics (including DualShockers) weighed in on the mediocrity of the line-up, and even offered a quick guide on how to build a better lineup of classics under budget with more games using your PlayStation Vita.
The PlayStation Classic is available for purchase now at a steep discount, though perhaps you want to see how low the price goes first.
The post PlayStation Classic Has Already Drastically Dropped in Price Following Middling Sales by Lou Contaldi appeared first on DualShockers.