Mnementh said:
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. |
Pretty much.
PlayStation said "their pillars were outdated" compared to Microsoft's.
You're right that the console market has stagnated for 3 generations now, it hit its ceiling long ago, meanwhile AAA development is rapidly increasing. Those internal Sony documents had concerns about how much their games were costing, even an Insomniac employee IIRC was asking if anyone even notices why Spider-Man 2 costs hundreds of millions. Meanwhile PC market and mobile exploded and mobiles are getting more powerful.
Not to be morbid but I think when us console heads die off, the new generations will care less about consoles and will be all about mobile, it surprised me how good kids are today at playing games on touch screen devices and actually better than they are with a controller, as mobiles become even more powerful, they'll be more of that in the future and as for PC, it's already getting everything from Sony and Xbox, Lol.
PlayStation has won the console race and hey it's a lot of players but there's little room for growth there anymore and they will have to expand their horizons eventually, I don't think they particularly care much about this move from Microsoft, they'll get more money from Microsoft but they still have issues to sort out in terms of other areas of growth.
I think it's fair to exclude Nintendo because their hardware varies so much because it tends to be more unique than the other two and if we're talking Switch, that's a combination of a handheld and a console, it appeals to a different userbase. So I agree with Xbox completely out of the picture, the PlayStation ceiling is roughly 180m...Maybe less if Xbox players migrate to PC instead.
Sony's growth in PC is small, they don't have the sorts of games that mass appeal to PC gamers but Xbox does, I'm talking things like Sea of Thieves, Survival Titles, GAAS, etc. Xbox consistently has multiple titles in the Bronze, Silver and Gold Steam rankings every year. As you said, Sony is a non-factor in Mobile as well. Microsoft had to brute force their way in, Lol.
Streaming I'm less convinced on but we'll see, a lot depends on ISPs.
Sony is winning hardware, no doubt, but Xbox will almost certainly overtake them in both revenue and profit margins, of which, profit margins is something everyone needs to improve, hence why Sony will be investing heavily in GAAS, they want sources of recurring revenue, not just a "one and done" thing, something that sticks around and helps recoup those investments into hardware.
The issue with that is, they're late to that as well, the biggest challenge to GAAS today isn't direct competition, it's time. Roblox can be completely different to GAAS #2 but nobody plays GAAS #2 because they're too busy playing Roblox, they don't have time to play anything else. This problem will increase when Microsoft drops a bunch of their own GAAS on PS before Sony does.
Now I'm not saying Sony is doomed or anything, nothing of the sort, I'm simply saying, Sony is probably indifferent to this move because they have things of their own that they need to focus on irrespective of whatever Xbox does. Xbox's moves won't change all the challenges that Sony has to face in the future.
