Id would rather the new consoles had all launched this year to be honest. It is time for something new...

DaRev said: theRepublic said: DaRev said:  Seriously, what is the point of them brining out new consoles at this point, when considering that PS3 and Xbox 360 seem to be in the prime of their lives? They are absolutely not in the prime of their lives.  Check this out from TheSource. http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=152463 Here is what I said later in the thread.  The short answer is that gamers in 2012 are now buying less games per year than they were when the consoles launched.  They both peaked in 2008.  Interested is waining.  It is time to move on. http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=5011079 theRepublic said: theRepublic said: Here is the separated analysis everyone was asking for.  I copy and pasted the exact numbers from the charts, so you will notice 2005 looks a little different because of the rounding TheSource did.   LTD Hardware Yearly Software Game Purchase Rate Year X360 PS3 X360 PS3 X360 PS3 2005 1,178,267 0 2,849,162 0 2.42 --- 2006 7,979,799 1,252,040 25,207,607 2,033,730 3.16 1.62 2007 15,859,351 9,174,095 61,447,450 37,173,227 3.87 4.05 2008 26,772,474 19,378,853 108,909,458 88,788,171 4.07 4.58 2009 36,932,992 32,376,827 107,118,181 96,837,921 2.90 2.99 2010 49,961,079 46,388,642 133,691,251 131,311,968 2.68 2.83 2011 63,769,444 60,507,735 154,713,292 148,409,212 2.43 2.45 2012 74,249,953 72,396,583 143,023,845 135,880,467 1.93 1.88 I guess I will throw in a little of my own analysis. If you were to graph the game purchase rate against time, it would make a rough bell curve with both consoles peaking in 2008.  It is pretty amazing how far both consoles dropped in 2009, with both falling  more than one game in purchase rate.  It was more slow decline in 2010 and 2011, but 2012 brought another small cliff.  Both fell another half game in 2012.  The Xbox360 has now dropped below its launch point.  The PS3 has not yet gone that low, but it is close.  I would not be surprised by another 0.5 drop in purchase rate for 2013.  That would put both consoles well below their rate at launch.  Clearly, that would  be the time for new consoles. yeah, but isn't that a bit expected that the first time you buy a console, you would buy at least two games? I mean I just bout a Wii U and bought 2 games at launch and will buy at least two more before April 2013. Saturation of the market doesn't mean that the consoles or the games are past their prime, because many games still sell in the millions today. So if I'm readng your chart correctly, the fact that Sony was selling 4.5 games when the pS3 was at 19m in 2008,  doesn't make it more profitable than now its selling 1.8 games with 72m consoles on the market. Doesn't that say that Sony (and MS) are making more money now on games than they did back in 2008? or am I reading this wrong?

Yes they sold more software than 2008.  But global software for both the 360 and PS3 is down by 8% from 2011.  We are already on the downslope and the drop is only going to accelerate from here.

The game purchase rate is more a measure of interest level than anything else.  People were most interested in these consoles in 2008.  Your early adopters were still in and interested, and the mass market was in there and buying lots of games.  The interest level has now dropped below what it was when the consoles launched.  The early adopters are all long gone, the mass market doesn't really care much anymore, and now you have the late adopters picking up the console.  The late adopters don't buy much anyway though.  More likely they buy used games.

We are likely to see a similar drop in interest this year (about -0.5).  That would means the average gamer is only picking up about 1.5 games per console for the whole year.  That is a far cry from the 4 or 4.5 we saw in earlier years.  What does that mean for publishers?  The average gamer is probably going to buy what they consider the biggest game of the year, and then maybe one other game.  Likely something with a lot of hype too.  That is a tough pool of customers to sell to when they are buying so few games.  It is much easier to catch a consumer's interest when they are going to buy 4 games in a year.  That means the big titles will be fine, but it will be increasingly difficult to sell the midrange stuff.  That is a very difficult environment for publishers to survive in.  That includes first party publishers, since they need to sell their games too.  The less total games sold, the less licensing fees they get too.  We already had one year of decline and this year will be another.

It is time to move on.

They are releasing a new console because they don't want to be left behind by the Wii U.

richardhutnik said: Vinniegambini said: Market fatigue. By the end of console generations, people buy less games; thus, the arrival of new consoles re-ignites the gaming industry and raises interest of future games. Will need to see what the new consoles do.  Are we at a place where merely a new console with better graphics alone, is going to be enough to revitalize?  Fatigue could be completely over the videogame industry itself.

This happens at the end of every console cycle.  Interest fades, and new hardware reignites that interest.

True, there is no guarantee that the peak of the next gen will top the peak of this gen.  But there is no question that it will bring a boost.

AgentZorn said: They are releasing a new console because they don't want to be left behind by the Wii U.

lol Nintendo is on its own. Microsoft HAS to launch because they have no more exclusives left. Sony doesnt have to but they cannot let Microsoft gun for more of their marketshare. Why do you think Microsoft has the marketshare they have this gen? They took a large bite out of Sonys.

The relase of a new console should be made when the old still has sales that can sustain your income until the new console can live on it's own; you're not relasing a console based on todays sales, but on sales 2 years from now. If you're going to release your console after the sales have dropped, you're going to end up in a bad financial position - just look where Nintendo currently stands (relatively). Or what happened to Sega; even when the sales of Dreamcast shed light at the end of a tunnel, the company went down.

The second thing is, that they don't want to give Nintendo too much of a headstart. The more a competitor sells its own system, the worse your position is.

Sony and MS aren't likely going to announce their new consoles until they have to - in fear of losing sales when gamers start to wait for the new ones. However, there should be some games ready before the release to prevent what happened to Saturn - that literally had no games when it came into market.

@MarcusDJackson: Umm... I don't know if it's easier to program for PC, even if this is what you constantly hear from Windows devs when they need to program something else than Windows (you'd expect even the simplest application on mobile phones to cost billions because of how hard it is). On PC, due to constantly changing specs, you never really need to optimise the code for the processor, well, technically, you don't need to do that on consoles either, but when optimised, the performance is much better.
For an example, few years back, I read a story on paper about a university that rents processor time for businesses on their supercomputer. When a customer comes with a heavy program that they need to run, the guys at the university start by optimising the code - and when optimised, the customer notices that the program runs fine on a desktop...

S.T.A.G.E. said: lol Nintendo is on its own. Microsoft HAS to launch because they have no more exclusives left. Sony doesnt have to but they cannot let Microsoft gun for more of their marketshare. Why do you think Microsoft has the marketshare they have this gen? They took a large bite out of Sonys.

Actually one of the big reasons why 360 did so well, was because of their "Wii60" that caught wind in the internet. Being able to buy Wii and 360 for the price of a PS3 was a contributing factor in the first year or two (of PS3). After MS realised Wii caught wind in the real world, they kept very quiet about the "Wii60".

The competition for the love of 3rd parties is much bigger between Sony and Microsoft than Nintendo, but the multiplatform games for the three aren't coming to Wii U before they're coming to the next Sony and MS consoles, due to planned release dates and games to be finished. In a case where 720 and PS4 would be delayed, you'd see the 3rd party multiplatform titles start coming out for Wii U before the release of the competing consoles.

bdbdbd said: S.T.A.G.E. said: lol Nintendo is on its own. Microsoft HAS to launch because they have no more exclusives left. Sony doesnt have to but they cannot let Microsoft gun for more of their marketshare. Why do you think Microsoft has the marketshare they have this gen? They took a large bite out of Sonys. Actually one of the big reasons why 360 did so well, was because of their "Wii60" that caught wind in the internet. Being able to buy Wii and 360 for the price of a PS3 was a contributing factor in the first year or two (of PS3). After MS realised Wii caught wind in the real world, they kept very quiet about the "Wii60". The competition for the love of 3rd parties is much bigger between Sony and Microsoft than Nintendo, but the multiplatform games for the three aren't coming to Wii U before they're coming to the next Sony and MS consoles, due to planned release dates and games to be finished. In a case where 720 and PS4 would be delayed, you'd see the 3rd party multiplatform titles start coming out for Wii U before the release of the competing consoles.

Wii60 caught a minority if avid gamers who were consuming the products. I was apart of it myself, pissed off at Sony for launching at such a ridiculous price. The PS3 still beat Microsofts first year sales though, so that changed nothing. Microsoft aligned themselves so close with Sony that 90% of their games were already offered on their platform (which at the time was cheaper) so gamers couldn't make the clear distinction between them. Gamers switched to Microsoft and that was all she wrote. The same games, cheaper price, better multiplats but once Sonys marketshare grew again the exclusives dried up for Microsoft. All it came down to was exclusives and once people realized that the third party exclusives dried up, Sonys third, second and especially first party grew into prominance. The veil was lifted that Microsoft had artificial stability when it came to game development and couldnt statisfy the need compared to Sony outside of FPS and TPS shooters. Sony needs to find their shooter next gen, plain and simple.

^Of course it's a minority, but having a couple of million extra sales early in it's life is definately huge, when you are negotiating 3rd party games for your platform.

The huge amount of 3rd party exclusives that PS3 was set to have in 06-08, that went to multiplatform release, wasn't just because of lackluster PS3, but also because publishers saw 360 userbase being big enough.

Of course, there's not just a single reason why things went like they did, but a sum of number of reasons. In retrospect you could say that Sony did everything wrong, and it would have been better for them to skip the 7th generation completely (or atleast the PS3 part), as it would have made them more money.

S.T.A.G.E. said: AgentZorn said: They are releasing a new console because they don't want to be left behind by the Wii U. lol Nintendo is on its own. Microsoft HAS to launch because they have no more exclusives left. Sony doesnt have to but they cannot let Microsoft gun for more of their marketshare. Why do you think Microsoft has the marketshare they have this gen? They took a large bite out of Sonys.

How is launching an entirly new system going to give them more excluisves than they previously had?