You got it, cheers.

1) Grand Theft Auto VI could certainly be the biggest entertainment launch of all time. And I think that's the expectation. No pressure.

There are two things on which the 2025 forecast (and heck, even beyond) rests - Grand Theft Auto VI and the new Nintendo hardware device.

Grand Theft Auto VI has to not only pull players in, but it also has to successfully transition its existing player base. But yes, if any game should be able to do this, it should be Grand Theft auto VI.

2) So, looking at this purely from the US market perspective, sure, lowering the price of hardware should help the adoption rate of that hardware. However, what companies are doing now is looking at the total lifetime value of that additional customer and balancing out that long-term potential with the short-term opportunity. You're also seeing more bundling happening (adding content or accessories to a hardware package) to increase the perceived value of the hardware purchase without dropping the price. Bundling has been a very effective means of driving hardware purchase.

And it's tough to say that adoption has been hurt too much by the current pricing. Switch is getting very close to PS2's lifetime sales in the US, while PS5 is tracking 8% ahead of PS4's pace. Xbox Series is trending 11% behind Xbox One's pace and is now 5% behind the Xbox 360 trend. But Microsoft has certainly expressed a decreased focus on the console as an ecosystem driver, for better and/or worse.

Perhaps we'll see even more aggressive bundling and short-term price promotion over the coming couple of years for PS5 and Xbox Series, but I think the era of $199 consoles is long gone.

https://www.installbaseforum.com/threads/industry-q-a-mat-piscatella-answers-your-questions.3249/post-289459

$199 consoles are dead and buried. Not only because of increasing costs, but because the corporations know that gaming is so popular that they can charge $400 and up in most cases.
PS5 is tracking ahead of PS4 in the US because of the momentum from PS4. It's true that PS3 turned a ton around from 2009 onward but it was never as popular as PS4 consistently.
Xbox Series is tracking behind Xbox One because of Xbox's PC strategy and the cost of the console. A lot less motivation to buy an Xbox Series if it only has some console exclusives and no true exclusives. Xbox Series was tracking ahead of other Xbox consoles for a while, but it doesn't have the legs of Xbox 360 or even Xbox One. It was a lot easier to find a Series X/S before 2023 than a PS5 so some people that were more platform agnostic or multiplatform owners bought an Xbox Series instead of trying to find a PS5.

I wonder which one is ahead since PS5 launched, Switch or PS5. Not that it matters (different beasts all together), or anything, just curious. Has the Switch outsold the PS5 since the PS5's launch date?

PS5 probably this gen is surpsingly the region where Sony was always dominant: Europe

Me thinks the issue is less with Sony, Sony is okay

The "problem" is the kind of games Europeans likes the most. Which are generally COD, Soccer games and GTA. None of those really needs a new console to be played

Consoles were always about perceived obsolescence, looks like this bussines model is now losing ground in Europe, as people no longer perceive their PS4 as obsolete. I can see many people skipping PS5 altogether and going straight to PS6 eventually

There's also the fact that the economic situation in most of Europe has been not ideal for a while. And the PC market is most likely eating into this audience as well.

Very adequate video by the way .. with which I fully agree.

That's not what they were asking. Those are just lifetime charts. They were asking which has sold more since the PS5 launched. So which has sold more over the past 4 years.

He can easily check in the hardware by date tab.

Since PS5's Launch, PS5 sold 63.5M worldwide, and Switch sold 77M.

If the question is for US, then PS5 sold 22M, and Switch sold 23.5M since November 2020.

Regarding adoption rates and pricing, while price cuts have almost always spurred some kind of sales growth for a console, I could see how The Big Three could be looking at how their consoles have been selling well enough at launch price to think they don't need to bother with price cuts anymore. Then again, the dawn of the 2020s was subject to market conditions that were anything but normal, with artificially high demand for video games in general combined with supply shortages for the PS5 & XBS. The growth for those systems was arguably more due to improved stock allowing for the release of pent-up demand rather than a legit spike in interest.

For example, in the U.S. the PS5 started off well, but had a very slow Q4 in 2021, followed by an nearly 25% YoY decline in Q1 2022 and a further YoY drop of almost 6% in Q2 2022. February and May of 2022 were some of the worst months ever for a PlayStation system in the U.S. during the generation proper. But from Q3 2022 to Q2 2023 we saw sales improve significantly. Holiday sales for the PS5 in 2022 weren't anything spectacular, but were still a dramatic improvement over the previous year, with sales for the quarter being up about 90% YoY. And Q1 2023 was up even more, with sales be well over twice what they were in Q1 2022. In fact, that quarter set a record for non-holiday PS5 sales in the U.S. Sales did slow in Q2 2023, but were still up YoY. Q3 2023 was about flat YoY and Q4 was slightly down, but were still strong, and combined with the strong first half the PS5 sold over 6.8M units in 2023, the third-best year ever for a PlayStation system in the U.S., behind only the PS2's 2002 (8.56M) and the PS1's 1998 (7.11M). And it accomplished this growth and strong sales with no price cuts and no new models. We never saw sales growth like this before absent some sort of stimulative factor, be it a price cut or hardware revision or some external factor.

We live in unprecedented times, and this goes for video games as well. Circumstances have been anything but normal this decade. This generation's sales dynamics were affected by supply issues far more so than any other generation. Unless there's something truly disruptive during the next generational transition, we probably shouldn't assume the PS6 & Xbox 5 will exhibit the same dynamics in their sales curves, and they may need price cuts to spur sales growth. I imagine Sony & MS will probably hold off at first to see what happens, but if sales don't exhibit any sort of growth after the first couple of years they may issue price cuts to stimulate growth.