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, youcan 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 only130,000 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:
However, this is where Amazon and their sales step in as a useful barometer of success. Using Amazon price trackerCamelCamelCamel, 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.ÂOnly 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:
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, whichYouTubers discovered in the first few days. Many critics (including DualShockers) weighed in onthe mediocrity of the line-up, and even offered a quick guide on how to build a better lineup of classicsÂunder budget with more games using your PlayStation Vita.
The PlayStation Classic is available for purchasenow at a steep discount, though perhaps you want to see how low the price goes first.
