| PixelPirate said: I would have loved to be fly on the |
Playstation is in a shitpile of their own. When they said MS has moved past their pillars or something (too lazy to look up the exact wording), they weren't joking. Playstation wins in the console race (well, excluding Switch for now, but that may be a bit different). But what does it matter, if the market for console is stagnating, while PC market with Steam and the mobile markets have seen enormous growth over the past years. Add to that subscription services like Gamepass and Streaming, both of which may get bigger over the next years, and winning the console market doesn't feel so grand anymore, it's becomes more and more like being the winner in the arcade market: obsolete.
Let's take a closer look here what I mean. Let's look at the combined sales of the past generations.
PS2+Xbox: 183M
PS3+Xbox 360: 173M
PS4+Xbox One: 175M
You can see this market is overall stagnating. No big changes in overall users. Now I excluded here Nintendo, but this is down that they address more volatile user bases. Or more precisely: more different ones. This can be seen by the wild swings: Gamecube barely moved the needle, Wii was wildly successful, WiiU was worse than GC, Switch again is on Top. As you see above, the success of the Wii didn't draw away gamers from PS3/Xbox 360 compared to the gen before, the failure of the WiiU didn't let Wii gamers migrate to PS4/Xbox One. I doubt the userbase of Switch is overlapping strongly with the Wii userbase, obviously there will be overlap, but if that overlap is much bigger than the cross reference of die hard Nintendo fans which is clearly visible in the sales of the WiiU is highly doubtful. So the market PS5 and in future PS6 will move in has a potential ceiling at 180/190 maybe 200M.
On the other hand other markets are going great. In 2023 14K games released on Steam. The reason is obviously, that Steam has attracted enough gamers, that many devs hope to make some money. Other platforms try to gain a share of this pie, notably GOG and EGS. It looks like the PC market might grow further, especially in east asia.Sony is 3rd-party in this market and has a weak presence. Their games release there over the last years, but don't gain much attention and Sony loses out as they have to share royalties. MS may not be super successful, they don't have a strong shop to compete with Steam. But they do have successful games on PC (at least more successful than PS), they have an ecosystem with Xbox and they offer Gamepass on PC.
The mobile market has exploded over the past years. I think no one is doubting that. The presence of Playstation is basically inexistant. That was the case for MS as well in the past, but now they own Fallout Shelter, Elder Scrolls Blades, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal and all of King. They have a strong presence. Also the current pressure on Apple offers an opening to establish their own platform shop. We don't know if MS is considering that, but we know that Amazon and Epic do. So the current market leaders Google and Apple may face more competition in the future. Playstation is nowhere to be seen.
Subscription services may or may not have a future. Netflix and Amazon are interested in such a thing, but XBox with Gamepass has here clearly the strongest entry. Playstation is trying to develop their offering, but they already feel like being far behind.
And Streaming possibly will grow over the next years, with a good chance to also zoom past console sales. I know Nvidia and Amazon are in this market, but probably much more, including MS with XCloud. And all these offerings are clearly ahead of Sony's offering with Playstation Now.
So in two markets that have already outgrown console or are doing it at the moment and two markets that may or may not be a big part of the future Playstation is far behind the competition already. MS actually is ahead in all four of these markets. They may not be market leader in everyone, but at least they are better than Sony.
So as you can see, there is not too much to gain from all this for Playstation. They are already winning in that market, but that market overall might become less and less relevant. So Sony actually has a lot to worry about.
