Sony hinted possible PS5Pro even before showing PS5

[DonFerrari]

CuCabeludo said:

This will, over time, make more people gravitate towards cloud services, when they realize they won't need to spend money upfront to upgrade to their systems every 2-3 years.

Not for me, I can decide if I want to buy an upgrade basically if I have spare money I'll buy, if not I won't. But I won't go to cloud for as long as HW allows me.

KLXVER said:

DonFerrari said:

having a 4 year cycle would split fanbase much more. Every game work fine on the base console, actually the pro was most of a left over since they made sure all games worked on base most of the games on Pro was just little more pixels and stable framerate.

Well the original Xbox had a 4 year cycle and the 360 did well. Same with the WiiU to Switch.

Im more inclined to buy a new console for 500, than an upgrade of the current one for 400. 

So your reasoning is that we should cut profitable consoles in 4 years because we have seem unsucessfull consoles be cut in 4 years?

You can buy the console when gen start and have it without buying mid-gen refresh. No one is required to buy mid-gen, actually even when it launched it was about 20% of sales, so most people don't have a need to buy the upgraded even when they don't have the base yet. They rather save money.

KLXVER said:

Dallinor said:

There's an obvious reason both of those consoles released a successor very quickly.

Xbox- 24 million

Wii U- 13.56 million

If you're the market leader like The PS4 cutting out over 40 million unit sales after the 4 year mark and billions in profit would be madness.

On the software side longer generations allows for multiple releases from studios, familiarity with the hardware, advancement in tech and hopefully better games. 

Well why not just make games for your popular console then? Whats the reason to upgrade it? To compete with the PC?

Because of saturation, the nextgen consoles are released about when the SW sales peak (and will start to slow down) so with the new HW you offset that loss in SW and it will keep balance.