Good numbers

Abysmal is a bit strong, I mean we've been seeing its weekly sales for a while now so no shock lol. Japan is abysmal. 

But for sure profit over hardware sales, although approaching the PS5 we can assume they will use PS4 to price penetrate the market and bring people in their services ecosystem. I expect a dramatic price cut soon. 

My biggest take away from this, and looking at the trend over the past 3 years is....

Physical media is DEAD.

In another three years, I expect we would find that less than 20% still buy physical. Now its making more and more sense why sony is making a digital-only PS5.

I had  a feeling for weeks that the European PS4 numbers were too high to be true. Seems like my feeling was correct in the end.

Keep in mind that the lockdowns certainly helped people to choose digital instead of physical due to lack of alternatives. I'm pretty sure that without the virus the physical sales numbers would be quite a but higher.

Well regardless it seems there was some confusion, but I suppose it doesn't matter much now that the numbers are getting changed anyways.

But now that we're on the topic I have a suggestion for the site. It might be hard to do with retroactive effect, but it would be pretty neat if the global weekly chart continued after 2018 with only hardware. It seems like the most practical tool for checking LTD as of a specific week. It also has the UK, Germany and France sections which I think you still track individually? But which are hard to find numbers for anywhere on the site (that I know of).

Does it matter though? The PS4 would still end up selling well over 125M by the time it's all said and done. The only other console (home) in existence to have come close to those kinda numbers is the PS2. And I don't think PS legs were ever really a thing, that only happened with the PS2, the PS1 didn't have legs. And if you look at it, I think it's obvious why the PS2 continued to sell really well when the PS3 came along. More interestingly though, launch aligned the PS4 is selling faster than the PS2 in the same 6-7yr period. If you want the PS4 to have legs, then just pray the PS5 comes in at $599 and the PS4 is dropped from $299 to $149. 

And right now, Playstation is making more money than the brand has ever made before. 

I think sony's primary and only focus should be to get all those PS4 owners over to the PS5 as quickly as possible. And preferably buying the digital SKU.

Its definitely going to be a niche. Even with the music industry being like over decade ahead in terms of this trend, physical CD sales made up 10% US music revenue and almost all big releases still have physical releases. So I imagine gaming being in a similar place at the end of the decade, meaning it at least will still be supported.

That definitely helped, but I see that as the final little push digital sales needed. Here, borrowed from ERA, this tracks quarterly sales since 2016. Between physical and digital sales.

Notice how there has been a steady increase in every single quarter of digital sales. The only anomalies are Q3 (holiday) and Q4 (jan - mar) sales and that is understandable considering the number of new console owners that typically spring up in Q3.

Yeah, definitely, covid made for a near 100% boost to digital sales, but I believe its indicative of where the market is generally going.

It is hard to see it in a graph and don't feel like they are abysmal...