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The story
A Sony campaign that gives you a discount coupon toward a PS5 purchase when you sell your PS4 at Furuichi, a used-book store chain under the GEO umbrella, has become a talking point on 5ch. The promotion runs until September 13, 2026, and the number of coupons available is capped. Many posters on the thread expressed surprise, saying they’d “never heard of a manufacturer telling people to sell their own hardware to a used shop,” and debate broke out over how this differs from trade-in programs run by Microsoft or smartphone makers, as well as how it squares with the fact that the current PS5 doesn’t even come with a disc drive included.
What people said
Bet they'll have leftovers lol
[Campaign Period]
Until Sunday, September 13, 2026 *Distribution will end as soon as the planned number of coupons is reached, even if we're still within the campaign period.
I wonder if they'll actually hit that limit
Don't you know about the manufacturer rep who said "Screw it, I'm selling my crap-box (糞箱, a derogatory 5ch nickname for Xbox)!"?
Guy from some fighting game company
Might be an industry first lol
Pretty sure they did something similar with the Vita
Official trade-ins are a thing plenty of companies do, like Google with Pixel
But telling people to sell to a totally separate, unrelated store — "go sell your PS4!" — that I genuinely have never seen
Exactly! Even Sony's own flop, the Vita, did the same thing! Re: #69
In the US, Xbox also offers discounts when you trade in your old console
That's Microsoft taking it back themselves though, right?
How is that the same as "go sell it to a used shop"?
Then Shitony (a common 5ch insult for Sony) should just take back the PS4 itself and hand out the discount coupon
Makes the PS5 basically ¥45,000
Meanwhile there's that garbage console only fetching ¥35,000 in trade-ins just a year after launch…
Well yeah, it's worth ¥35,000 because it's hardware you can't even get a warranty on secondhand
Meanwhile there's the garbage console whose own maker is practically begging you to switch away from it 🤣
When the performance is just as garbage anyway
There are weirdos like me who sold their PS5 to switch to the Switch 2, so that's normal enough
Forget all that, can you just tell me how to actually get this ¥10,000 discount?
People like that care more about convenience than raw power, so performance doesn't even factor in
If they cared about performance they'd have upgraded ages ago
At the very least, a console killing off physical discs isn't even on their radar
They're basically saying sell your discs too and rebuy everything as downloads
Full backward compatibility, just buy the digital version all over again!
That's rough lol
They should at least throw in a free disc drive for anyone upgrading from a PS4 lol
Honestly I'd bet half the people in the console-war threads (PSW) haven't even moved to PS5 yet
I mean there's basically no "fun games you can only play on PS5" to begin with
If they keep dragging their feet it's obvious PS4 holdouts will just get scooped up by the Switch 2 instead
These days you don't need a PS5 for "Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, or Monster Hunter" anymore
Even if they take a loss here, if they can lock people back into the ecosystem, they'll make it back through "the right to rebuy everything digitally"
The New Year's sale bundling a disc drive with the PS5 Digital Edition had a bunch of different stores running the exact same deal like they'd all coordinated it
And on top of that, they're pulling out of physical media entirely
Maybe optimize your own internal structure before dragging retailers into this
Probably some department's performance metrics that don't actually mean anything to the company as a whole
That's what you call sloppy, broken governance
Looking back on it now, wasn't bundling the disc drive really more about clearing out inventory early?
Sony had probably decided internally to drop discs long before this
That's a nasty way to do it
Once they drop discs entirely, a disc drive is genuinely just trash
Want to lower hardware cost
Want to push digital
But disc drives have high margins, so sell them separately for extra profit
→ Plan backfires, drives pile up unsold → dump them in the New Year's sale
→ Still barely sell → force an end to packaged (disc) sales entirely
→ Retailers run a clearance sale on physical stock as they prep to ditch PlayStation
Basically, retailers gave up on this a long time ago
Big chain stores only went along with it because they need product variety and there are manufacturer incentives
Re: #223
Who knows — doesn't seem like even the marketing department was told about the decision to end packaged sales until it was already final
It's not exactly a scandal
Which other companies officially do this exact thing then?
Go ahead and link a few examples
Wait, is that a pun on "used hardware" (中古本体) and "used book" (古本)!? Cut it out!
GEO has 2,000 stores, while the used-book chain Furuichi only has 170
If they're not using GEO — which could obviously reach way more people and make selling easier — that probably means either
GEO has given up on them, or the campaign is embarrassing enough (it's using the very secondhand system the fanboys used to trash) that they don't actually want much attention on it
PlayStation 4 Jet Black 500GB
Trade-in price: ¥15,000
PlayStation 4 Pro Jet Black 1TB
Trade-in price: ¥19,000
Huh, that's higher than I expected
I sold my Monster Hunter edition PSP last month since even as a spare it was just taking up space, and it went for over ¥20,000
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
This campaign lets users sell their PS4 at Furuichi, a used-book store chain under the GEO umbrella, in exchange for a discount coupon (worth around ¥10,000) toward a PS5 purchase; it runs until September 13, 2026, and the number of available coupons is capped. Discussion on the thread centered on the point that “it’s unusual for a manufacturer to officially tell people to sell to a used shop,” with posters noting that trade-in programs from companies like Microsoft or Google are different in nature since those companies collect the old hardware themselves. Some brought up a similar past promotion for the PS Vita, pushing back on claims that this was an “industry first.” Another major point of contention was how this squares with the fact that the current PS5 doesn’t come with a disc drive included, meaning PS4 owners switching over would still need to buy one separately — a contradiction several commenters called out. Real trade-in price examples were also shared (around ¥15,000 for a PS4, about ¥19,000 for a Pro), with some reacting that the amounts were higher than expected. There were also posts referencing a past figure who made dismissive remarks about the secondhand market, mockingly contrasting that stance with this campaign, but since that person is difficult to identify with certainty, this article omits those references.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Sony Sends PS4 Users an Email Urging Them to “Sell Your PS4 and Switch to a PS5!”.”
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