Sony no longer reporting PS4 shipments, Final Official total 117.00m

[Bofferbrauer2]

Kyuu said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Demand was much greater due to Covid. Not sure if it is still that much greater than PS4/XBO at the same time period after launch.

Also, this could just mean that the systems are more front-loaded. Having a big start doesn't have to mean it will last for a long while, just look at the Wii.

As for the PC part, I think that's the reason why Playstation plus Xbox totals have been constantly dropping each generation, but I don't think the PC will cut the legs of this gen short.

PS360 was an unusually long generation that also partly appealed to a temporary demographic via Kinect (which sustained X360 sales in later years). PS4 and Xbox One's sales weren't inflated by longer lifespans or Kinect, not to mention last generation was hampered by Xbox ONE, arguably Microsoft's worst console. They were however inflated by mid-gen upgrades. I think "traditional gaming" as a whole is seeing a huge growth, but this growth is mostly felt if PC is part of the equation. Modern PC is essentially a customizable console and appeals to a large part of the traditional console crowd. A scenario where all consoles + PC grow in sales combined AND individually isn't impossible.

The thing is, if PC would be so detrimental to consoles, then they would have eaten them already before the launch of the PS4. PS360 got severely bashed even back then for being stuck in the past with ugly graphics that even weak PCs in 2008 could beat without a fuss. The Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GSO both were way more powerful than the GPUs in the consoles despite costing less than $100 MSRP (Radeon $79, GeForce $89). Paired with an Athlon 64 X2 4800 ($104 in 2007) and 2GiB DDR2 ram (~$80), cheap mainboard, PSU and case and you had a PC capable of beating the consoles in every way for less than $400.

@bolded: This has been true basically since the inception of 3D graphics. In fact, many of console's biggest 3rd party titles originated on PC (Fifa, GTA, Crysis, CoD...) an only later got ported to consoles. But for many years, the simplicity and cheap entry price of consoles meant that the move was the other way around, away from PC and to consoles. It's only starting the late 2000's that the trend got reversed somewhat and PC getting former console exclusives.

Part of the reason is that because consoles are basically stuck in time, they simply can't keep up with the ever evolving PC. Current gen consoles are comparable to mid-range PCs right now, next year they will be closer to entry-level PCs already. And since the hardware is practically the same, it also means that the same tricks for boosting performance on consoles which helped them keep up with the PC over time now also work for the most part on PC, negating the bonus.

@italic: It's not impossible of course, but like you explained yourself, they're competing with each other for the same market. Which means that for actors in the market to grow, the market needs to grow. Right now, the gaming market is mostly growing due to DLC and microtransactions, and most of it is on mobile devices, hardware sales are not growing by much if we take out the increase in price of PC hardware. I think this diagram says it all:

As you can see, while in absolute numbers PC + consoles did grow, they only did marginally so over the course of a decade. In other words, don't expect much market expansion over the next couple years.