Sony's New Gaming Hardware Is Freakin' Overpriced

If you’re anything like us here at Cracked, you’ve been waking up in the dead of night in a cold sweat lately. And not because you had a nightmare that your sleep paralysis demon finally knew you had feelings for it. It’s because everywhere you go, you hear echoes of the deadliest refrain, “recession”. “A recession is coming,” people whisper in taverns and homes across the land. The rent is too damn high, minimum wage is synonymous with unpaid bills, and whimsical browsing Zillow is simply too depressing. So why in the name of Bernie Sanders is Sony making $300 headphones?

Sony is releasing a new line of gaming hardware branded as “Inzone”. You better be in the zone if you spent 900$ on a gaming monitor. The zone of a higher tax bracket. Some us have three, four, even five cats to feed. *spits out coffee* You have kids?! Oh buddy, Sony doesn’t want you to have kids, it wants you to spend one hundred American dollars for a WIRED headset. Initial reviews like this one from the Washington Post are…meh. The wireless headset landscape is well saturated and with so many affordable and frankly more stylish options out there, it might be a slog for even a tech juggernaut like Sony to break through in a meaningful way.

According to IGN’s stats, video game consoles have been getting less expensive since their inception. As a product becomes more ubiquitous, production methods become more refined and efficient, competition lowers consumer costs, and the product becomes readily available to the growing market. Inflation, supply chain shortages, even the looming threat of total recession are an aftershock of quarantine (and severe mismanagement by private and public ruling powers, but that’s a larger article, we’re here to rant about headphones.) With a market flooded with ever cheaper options, does Sony really think we have 230$ to cough up from our COVID riddled lungs for a headset with a mic that’s not even that great? We don’t have any savings, our only joy is telling kids to go cry to their daddies when we end them in Fortnite. And we need a gaming mic that can pick up our words loud and clear.