Sony Confirms PS5 is Most Successful PlayStation with $136B in Sales So Far

[Cerebralbore101]

Kyuu said:

Cerebralbore101 said:

Revenue gauges popularity how? Whales can easily support an unpopular game. Concurrent and active player measurments often fail to consider the people who bought the game and put it into their backlog. It also assumes that someone who finished the game isn't a customer and overlooks them. Revenue and concurrent players are meaningless metrics because both lack key data that is needed for a big picture. Without production and dev costs revenue is meaningless. Without sales figures concurrent players is meaningless. 

Except we do have enough data for unit sales and development costs. A slight increase in revenue easily deletes the rising development costs, I wrote a couple of detailed breakdowns on how dev cost vs revenue works and you seemed to agree.

A PS5 that sells a 100 million units at $500 is decidedly more popular than a PS5 that sells the same at $400. Because the extra $100 is prohibitive to a large segment of buyers. Similarly, Nintendo's games holding their prices is 100% an indicator of popularity, and is in no way "inflating revenue". Expensive consoles do not guarantee higher overall hardware revenues unless the consumer sees the value and decides to buy. PS5 selling so well at such high prices is objectively an indicator of popularity. Profitability is another story because it takes into account a crap ton of other factors, but Sony is beating their profit records as well and is stating to see huge year over year increases now that acquisitions (and Concord!) are behind them. Sony already made more profit this generation than what they made in the four previous generations combined. So the higher revenues are definitely netting them more money.

Only a compete fool would look at hardware sales alone without considering other factors. I loved my PS2, but the Playstation business today is much bigger and more successful (they're products of different eras. PS2 is indeed more impressive with its era in mind). And expensive products don't necessarily lead to higher revenues.

Are you factoring in inflation with your profits claim? 

Something selling equally well at $100 more doesn't mean it's more popular. It just means that price isn't a prohibiting factor at $100 more for the majority of consumers.