IcaroRibeiro said:
You're forgetting the lurkers. Forum users, reddit users, Twitter users. Gaming has a huge number of people who follow news and rumors in advance. The average gamer is not the target of the release window. The nature of smartphone market is a bit different. Two, three and even four lines of smartphones coexist in the market for a couple of years. Most of smartphones are functionally the same, just with some hardware upgrades. Even software support and SO is the same for different models, hence you don't need to feel totally alienated to not have the newest version. In console one line pretty much replaces the other. It's expected the next generation games to not be always playable on your current consoles. Acquiring hardware is a mostly planned purchase, you get a console and calculate how many years of support and games you have on it before replacing your machine. The announcement of PS5 (one year before its launch) haven't killed PS4 momentum in any sense, because people who were waiting for the sixth year to get their FIRST PS4 were never the target of a launch window for PS5. The pool of consumers is essentially different. Even if some people decided to not buy a PS4 it didn't hurt Sony in long term, a weaker quarter sales can be easily maked up by a very strong PS5 launch which was precisely what happened For manufacturers is actually good business if people adopt their next hardware asap, because the purpose of a new hardware is to replace the old one |
Well traditionally one console has replaced the other, but I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case going forward. Nintendo doesn't have to do that unless they want to. They could have the new hardware co-exist with the existing hardware for years if they want. The 3DS-Switch kind of already did this but the 3DS was a lot weaker by that point in its lifecycle just because it was never a huge sales monster to begin with.
4-5 months is enough time these days to unveil a new system and have it on storeshelves, Switch, Switch OLED, PS5 are all 5 months or less from product reveal and actual information being given to being available to purchase.
I'm not really sure what announcing 1 year early really does. Even "hardcore gamer" is still going to wait to see the actual system and games available before getting all that excited.