1y ago

Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’

www.theverge.com

Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’::Sony has cut its sales forecast by 4 million units for the fiscal year, down from 25 million to 21 million. It comes as the company missed its sales projections by a million.

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1y ago

Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’

www.theverge.com /2024/2/14/24072692/sony-ps5-forecast-cut-q3-2023-earnings

54 comments

Just go PC and don't worry about corporate lifecycles anymore
- gpu and cpu vendor enter the chat
  
  Fair but thats your choice to upgrade. No one says you have to, and they don't lock games behind needing insert current gen CPU or gpu
The PS5 feels next-gen to me, rather than current gen, lol
Probably because I was a late adopter to the prior gen, and I don't have a current gen console (just a PC).
- To me the PS5 feels like PS4.5 at most.
  The box even says “8K capable” and they promised an amazing 4K-8K 120hz raytracing heaven before release. Every time I see the box or watch old presentation videos I feel scammed.
  Because in reality almost all games have a pathetic “slow mode with higher res” (often 30 fps!) or “fast mode with previous generation graphics and resolution” (usually some variable upscaled mess and far from native 4K).
  It’s still a decent machine (I like it being silent a lot, load times are also quite good) and I enjoy gaming regardless of performance BUT their promises were nothing but a marketing scam. It feels far from “next generation” to me.
  (Same goes for Xbox Series X of course, it’s just as bad in this sense.)
  
  With their inability to meet demand that first year they made many of us into patient gamers. I bought a PS4 Pro for a couple hundred bucks when that frenzy was going down and will happily play through that massive catalog at 12 bucks a game as long as they still charge almost $500 for a 4-year-old console.
  
  We should see an improvement in game quality for the platform once last-gen sales drop off enough that developers only need to target current-gen.
  Right now any game that comes out for both PS4+5 is bottlenecked by PS4 memory and performance, with only easy wins taken for PS5 like higher quality assets and faster IO/FPS.
  Designing a game for current-gen platforms from the ground up is when we'll start to see some more impressive features, but there's still money on the table for PS4 so it'll be a few years (IMHO) before we see PS5 exclusives as the norm.
  
  I hear ya but they launched with RDNA 2, ray tracing is AMD's 1st gen implementation with dubious claims about their ray accelerators being a hardware solution, and 10tflops with 36 CU's (compared to the 6800xt's 72), the writing was on the wall during launch. Soon as we had specs, all of their claims looked like bullshit to me from the start.
  I do admire their overclocking trick to compensate, and I do really enjoy their UX along with that bamf controller. They definitely pulled the right business tricks, but high framerates and ray tracing was laughable to me. Just marketing myth, and I feel you. 30fps is cringe to me and I wish consoles could get past that shit.
Lower the price.
- Yep, the ps2 was half the launch price by this part of the cycle.
- As far as I know they already lose money selling them because they make way more money through PS plus and the PS store
  
  Consoles never really make money.
  The money is in locking consumers in your ecosystem, which is why exclusives used to be a big deal. Now they'd rather their games be available to people on other consoles since they bought up too many studios
  Like, Xbox wants everyone that owns a Xbox to buy COD for Xbox. But they also can't limit it to Xbox because a bunch of ps5 people would buy it if they could. So it's better to sell thru ps5 then losing all those potential customers that will never buy an Xbox.
- I wish they did the opposite. Release a €999 PS5 Pro with specs that justify that price.
Aside from the Switch, which just quietly prints money, this generation of consoles feels like a huge failure.
The Xbox launch was so bad I couldn't tell you what the latest Xbox is called, and the PS5 had its hype during a global pandemic, and seemingly couldn't bother to release games during that period.
While the "latter stage" could basically mean 4-5 years, I don't really see what the big rush is. Let 2020-2022 be a write-off, and focus on getting some fucking games out! I have a PS5, but purely because I got it as a gift. All of my games, aside from one, are PS4 games.
Obviously, there will be some big names that'll likely come out during this time. We'll likely see a new COD game, GTA6, ideally a new GOW came, and FF7's latest part. With that being said, 2024 is extremely underwhelming for games.
I just play upscaled 4k GameCube games on Dolphin.
- The wii games look amazing too! I don’t remember Super Mario Galaxy looking that good.
They've barely released any PS5 exclusive games. This feels like a massive ripoff.
I mean probally cause the console was an utter failure, I see no diff between my ps4 to my ps5, Supply failed at launch for 3 years, the exclusives have sucked, PS Plus went up on all tiers and features for it have been a roaring dumpster fire this is without taking into concideration the UI revamp sucks. I haven't even had the urge to fire mine up since October.
This compared to the series X that while hasn't had /great/ exclusives either, has well counteracted that downside with a huge gamepass library that connects directly with PC and had the supply to keep up with demand.
- Connection between PC and XBox is a feature that I didn't know I would love so much before. The family is occupying the TV, fine I could fire the same game up on the PC.
  
  Fully agree, I didn't think I would use it much either, but the fact that you can make any game suddenly a keyboard and mouse game is a game changer. It opened up the ability to run your strategy and your RTs and your survival games using keyboard and Mouse games like Ark I can't imagine playing with a controller however I can play with my Xbox friends because the fact that I can just play Ark using keyboard and mouse while they play on their console
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sony now expects to sell 4 million fewer PS5 consoles in its 2023 fiscal year ending March 31st compared to previous projections, Bloomberg reports.
In its third quarter, Sony’s gaming revenue was up 16 percent versus the same period the previous year, sitting at 1.4 trillion yen (around $9.3 billion), but operating income was down 26 percent to 86.1 billion yen (around $572 million) due to promotions in the third quarter ending on December 31st.
According to Sony, the company plans to emphasize profitability over unit sales as the console approaches its fourth birthday.
“Looking ahead, PS5 will enter the latter stage of its life cycle,” said Sony senior vice president Naomi Matsuoka in comments reported by Bloomberg.
For this reason, we expect the annual sales pace of PS5 hardware will start falling from the next fiscal year.” Sony added it has no plans to release “any new major existing franchise titles” in its next fiscal year.
Later this year, Microsoft is expected to release a refreshed Xbox Series S and a disc-less Xbox Series X codenamed Brooklin with double the amount of storage as its existing model, while Nintendo is also expected to release a follow-up to its seven year-old Switch console.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Why would anyone buy a PlayStation? All the games are making their way to PC now. Also the Xbox games. You can emulate the switch games.
- Because we want to enjoy gaming in the couch and have no crappy hardware mess, driver and update hell. Just a box that works and can be played from cozy cushions while talking to friends next to us instead of sweat, back pain and eye strain at a desk.
  If you like pc gaming that is great but it’s weird that you can’t see there are different types of gamers.
  
  Ironically when I was at a friend who owned an Xbox One, he had to update his crap system way more often.
- But all that requires effort. For many people, if there is an obstacle that takes away even just several minutes prior to actually playing the game, an important time window might be missed and the opportunity gone.
  Also, sitting down in a dedicated space that more often than not features associations of work, an office etc. to play a game has a completely different vibe to it. You pretty much are required to switch your head space to "gaming", it becomes a thing, something serious, non-casual. Depending on your living arrangements, you're isolated from your family sitting in the living room while you're in the "office space", playing. You're not lounging on a couch since that isn't all that compatible with the input style of most games (ever found a relaxing pose operating a keyboard and mouse? For the love of god, teach me). I know PCs handle controllers just fine, but IMHO, not many games are optimized for controller usage on PC.
  All that doesn't really lend itself to a lifestyle where gaming, while still being enjoyed, simply doesn't have the same goals or can even attain the same priority in life.
  Let me shave off 25 minutes of my day to just relax on the couch dude, life is hard enough.
- Demon Souls, Bloodborne and Last of Us (before it came to PC) for me. I use my PC connected to my TV 90% of the time but the monthly games with a PS subscription are pretty nice
- Because I want to play on my couch, not at my desk. I want a system that works without me having to tweak it constantly.
- They make their way to pc way later and if you want to play them at their best you need a graphics card and cpu combo that would cost more than a ps5.
- The games don't usually come out on PC until a significant amount of time has passed since the console release. Not everyone wants to wait, and often those games are poorly optimized on PC.
  I stopped buying games on PlayStation since I got my Steam Deck, but there are occasionally exclusives that will entice me back. The next FFVII chapter is probably going to be one such game. I played the demo last weekend and enjoyed it immensely.
  
  Poorly optimized? They run better on PC than PlayStation. Horizon zero dawn and FF7 remake run beautifully on the steam deck. A handheld.
- Demons Souls being the exception that I can think of off the top of my head.
- Cause I don’t want to spend more money and (more importantly) more time to build a PC. People got shit to do.

54 comments