Sony took an earful from angry gamers this week when pre-release PS4 models showed game download prices of up to £62.99 for some EA titles like FIFA 14 and Battlefield 4.
Following a healthy dose of outrage, Sony dropped the prices to £54.99 to match those on the Xbox One, ahead of Friday's big launch in the UK and Europe.
However, on the eve of the console's release Sony has claimed those initial high prices were only preliminary and would never have appeared on the final device.
"Some pricing went live prematurely this week, which caused a lot of people to react to pricing that wasn't final. So that wasn't ideal," Fergal Gara, vice-president and managing director UK & Ireland of Sony Computer Entertainment told Pocket-Lint.
"The pricing that will be full and final as of tonight, that's the launch pricing - not the price points that may have been seen earlier in the week."
Parity with discs
Gara also sought to give a little context as to why those download prices are still higher than the physical discs available in stores. Amazon, for example, is shipping the same games for £47.00 - a saving of £7.99.
He added: "What we would like to see is that pricing for digital titles, where it is also available on disc, will be comparable. And we want to see an environment where discs still have a chance to succeed and retailers have a chance to continue to prosper, both with disc-based products and with digital.
"Ultimately, I think that when it comes to full games it's still very early days. The DLC space is quite mature already, but full game downloads are still quite new and there's a lot of learning; a lot of trial and experimentation by us, PlayStation Store and of course gamers as to what's right."
- Check out our up-to-date review of the PS4
