BraLoD said:
Sony is going downhill... lol Playstation is more profitable than it ever was. And it'll be even more next gen. |
PS2 was very profitable and very successful. Then the PS3 came and almost bankrupted the company. I'm seeing this thought process where people assume if a console is doing well in the current generation it will translate into the next game. That hasn't happened since the PS2. This same thought process let people eating crow already when they assumed the Switch would sell like the Wii U (and guess what, it did the exact opposite). More often than not, the market leader becomes the market loser. Let's take a trip through memory lane
Generation 7's winner was the Wii (ignoring handhelds for a minute). The previous generation saw them as a 3rd, close behind the Microsoft's first console, the XBox. Sony, despite being the top dog in Generation 6, saw a massive decline with the PS3. While Sony did outsell the 360, this was due moreso to Sony being established in other markets. Microsoft was really only competitive in a few markets (the Americas and the UK). Even with this, the game was only a few million between them. This should show you how far Sony fell in Gen 7.
Generation 8 has been Sony's game after the disaster of the PS3. Both Nintendo and Microsoft saw massive declines with the Wii U and the XBox One after having done exceptional in the previous generation. Nintendo got hit the hardest as the 100 million selling Wii was succeeded by the Wii U which sold around 13 million.
Generation 6 is the only time a console has done better than the previous one. PS2 outsold the PS1. This one is unique as Microsoft entered the market for the first time while Sega exited. Nintendo did worse as well. Generation 4 followed a similar pattern. the SNES beat the Genesis thanks to Donkey Kong Country, but sales of the SNES declined from the NES. Generation 5 saw Sony out performing Nintendo and Sega doing worse again. Even Generation 3 saw a similar decline as Atari wasn't able to create the same success as the 2600.
Again, the trend is that generations are a complete reset and they usually don't go the way of the previous one. There are only a few exceptions 1)Generation 4 saw Nintendo on top though they lost quite a bit of market share to Sega 2)Sony doing better in generation 6 and 3)Nintendo always winning in the handheld space. Based on this, it's very safe to say Sony will crash as Unknownsoul pointed out (not sure why he was banned for those post but whatever). A question from there is why? Why do consoles always do worse, and I think it's due to a "gift of defeat, curse of victory." The loser has to do some real introspection and find out why they did so poorly in the market. Was it the messaging? The games? The features? The winner isn't going to do that because they won. They aren't going to analyze their blunders because they were ahead. So their flawed thinking never gets ironed out. If anything, it reinforces their bad ideas. For Nintendo in Generation 8, it was that the system needed some peripheral and "innovation" and that would be enough. The result was a useless tablet that no one liked. Nintendo ironed it out in Generation 9 by focusing more on quality and unique software, making the system sleeker (rather than looking "like a Fisher-Price toy") and dialing down the control schemes.
The same issues are happening to Sony. Generation 8 is weird because Sony has benefited primarily from an improved economy in 2017 and onward (right when it peaked) which slowed the decline for them. However, this might make them over step farther than they would normally. Sony is chasing away Japanese developers through censorship. Japanese developed almost exclusively for the PS4 as it was the only console that was competitive in their market and did well abroad (which the 3DS really didn't). These developers will likely move to Nintendo. Sony is focusing on cinematic games but this has, in turn, made their output look too samey (i.e. the "Sony" game). It doesn't help that Sony's 1st party sales are very low. The best selling PS4 game from Sony is Horizon at 10 million. Nintendo, with 1/4th of the install base, already has 5 games over 10 million. And there have been enough issues with EA and Activision that Sony may not be able to rely on them to push the system. Sony would also announce titles far before theyre ready making their line-up look better than it is. Consumers will likely be wary if Sony does this twice. Case in point, there is enough under the surface to say Sony will have problems in generation 9. Given past trends, it's safer to say PS5 will sell worse than PS4.
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