mjk45 said:
Yes in PS4's case they have had their audience surpass PS3 total years ago and that combined with the near extra 30 million sales makes the post successor hardware drop off pretty meaningless it also explains why Sony wasn't to bothered in pushing sales up toward 130 million plus and instead like you mentioned kept the PS4 price point where it was and put it's manufacturing resources across to the PS5 knowing it could put that PS4 base to good use and it's why we got the back flip around cross gen, as to the PS2 here's a thought imagine if that had todays ecosystem behind it. |
Exactly. That's no longer the metric of success.
Instead of cutting prices and aggressively pushing old hardware to reach new heights at the tail end of a gen, the focus will be much more on a faster transition to new hardware and maintaining subscriptions.
Gamers in their ecosystem, cloud saves, cross generation game offerings and complete hardware BC also allow them to transition into the next generation a lot smoother and a lot faster. So a new generation isn't really a hard reset anymore, it's more of a continuation.
With that in mind, I don't think we will ever see PS reach the hardware sales of the PS2 again. In fact, looking ahead I believe the PS5 might be the last high (100m+) selling PS hardware unit, as the transition to PlayStation as a service will considerably ramp up in the coming years.
They essentially will follow the same road as MS eventually, but will be slower to move completely to PS as a service, because there is billions still to be made with their existing model.
