"Console sales are down. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella marked a 26% decline in spending on current-generation consoles this April compared to last April."
We're 4 years into the generation, sales declines aren't uncommon, but this gen has had unique challenges:
Covid fucked it all up. Supply chain issues screwed availability, software engineering ganked game development.
Too much emphasis on "Cross Gen". Why would someone scramble to get a hard to find PS5 or Xbox Series when the same game is out on PS4/Xbox One X?
Long generations are kind of the new thing, starting with Xbox 360/PS3. Previously they were around 5 years and people are looking for the next machines now.
Microsoft and Sony force them to develop for the lowest spec gen, so no you cannot play on your PS5/X whatever because PS4 and One X cannot run new game engine.
I think we're too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?
Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you're in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they're going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they've given players more and more reason to play on PC.
I picked up a Steam Deck to get into PC gaming and frankly, I don't get it. So many games not even worth the bandwidth to download much less actually play.
i'm the exact opposite. all my computers are macs so I've been gaming on PS5 for years. picked up an sd oled mostly to play hades, but have finished dead island 2, ghsot of tsushima and hogwarts legacy on it. the barrier to entry to play a game is so low with the steamdecks suspend feature, I can just pick it up and be playing 5 seconds later.
Steam is a platform that works best for word of mouth. Yes, 90% of it is crap if you just browse around. Hang around gaming forums and YouTube channels that highlight top indy games, and you'll soon have more games than you can play in a lifetime.
Those of us who rave about it have been doing this for years and have a big backlog. Now that I think about it, it would be difficult to jump in cold.
The money is in the users not selling the hardware. As long as Playstation has hundreds of million daily users they will continue to make insane profit. The people will move up a generation eventually.
