Fact:
ZhugeEX talked about "home" consoles. Please dont derail thread.
Sony’s PlayStation 4 has had an excellent start with more than 25.3 million units sold in as of June 30th 2015. This is estimated to be more than Microsoft’s Xbox One and Nintendo’s Wii U combined sell in totals which gives Sony’s console more than 50% market share this gen. This is something that the PlayStation 3 was not able to achieve.
According to a recent market research by report by Euromonitor, we can now confirm that the PlayStation family of home consoles is generating more revenue than the Xbox One / 360 and Nintendo’s Wii and Wii U combined. A first for Sony since the PS2 era, 2014 saw Sony generate revenues of $8 billion through sales of the PlayStation 4 and 3 whilst Microsoft’s and Nintendo’s home consoles could only generate revenues of $7.2 billion.
The new console launches have allowed both Sony and Microsoft to increase revenue quite drastically compared to the declining revenue trend seen before 2013. In fact the PlayStation 4 has allowed Sony to double the amount of revenue they made in 2012 across all home console sales. Nintendo on the other hand have seen a sharp decline in the revenue they generate from Wii and Wii U sales with total revenue down 25% since 2012.
Nintendo’s sharp decline actually came about before the launch of the Wii U, in 2009 Nintendo was still the leader for revenue generated by console sales but sales of the Wii started to drop off in 2010 causing revenues to decline whilst the successful launch of Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move allowed Sony and Microsoft to maintain revenues and overtake Nintendo in this space. The launch of the Wii U did nothing to stop the decline that Nintendo were seeing and this can mainly be attributed to the high pricing of the console and the confusing marketing that failed to capture the attention of the mainstream market. To date the Nintendo Wii U has only sold 10 million units worldwide.
Sony have been able to hold their $399 price point for almost two years now whilst Microsoft has had to drop the price from $499 to $349 in the space of a year just to remain competitive. It’s fairly clear that Sony are expecting revenues from home console sales to increase further in 2015, that should line up with increased profits on hardware as Sony stated in a recent financial report that the PlayStation 4 is now cheaper to produce, whereas Microsoft could see a year where revenue remains flat or could even decline. One area where Sony have seen a decline is in portable console sales, the discontinuation of the PSP and lack of worldwide appeal for the Vita have caused revenues from handhelds to drop by almost half since 2009.
Overall the console video game hardware market remains healthy and has beaten the slump that we saw at the end of the last generation.
