I don't think it's very likely that we will see a new player on the field. It's a tough business, even for a mega company like Microsoft with all of their resources.
Maybe some big Chinese entity might try, if any.
It's much easier to focus on the mobile market, although there still is a market for traditional consoles, and money to be made there that you can't get if you don't tap into it.

I think Sony strategy to sell games on PC is ok. Gaming PCs costs 1,5k$-2k$ and not many pc gamers will buy a PS5 on top of that for 3-4 exclusive games they might not even like much.

Marlboro won't win any championships because the opposition will smoke it 😊

TV centric PCs will become competition for Playstation (which is what the next XBox is basically going to be apparently), to be honest I would rather have a Windows-based "console" than a Playstation if I get the flexibility of different store fronts and PC functionality if I wish.

Why buy a game that locks you to you the Playstation ecosystem of devices when you could buy it on say Steam and play that same game on your PC, your living room TV, on a mobile device like Steam Deck, on a laptop, etc. etc.

Nobody wants small form factor PC's. They're expensive and underpowered. Expecting them to be a threat to Playstation is more silly than expecting handheld PC's to be a threat to the Switch 2. Don't be surprised if the GabeCube gets cancelled next week.

Most PC gamers will continue to play games on regular desktops. And most console gamers won't jump to underpowered and overpriced PC's. The threat to Playstation is PC and Steam as a whole ecosystem. Next Xbox (if it's a PC) and GabeCube are petty much non-factors.

But the majority of PS gamers won't want to abandon their existing library which will carry over to PS6 and the PS6 handheld. There are still plenty of reasons to get a Playstation over PC. Sony potentialy returning to true exclusivity and the RAM crisis destroying PC hardware prices are the latest reasons.

Sony isn't such a strong First Party Publisher anyway. Who cares.
Now all Third Party Publishers port all their games to pc, so we pc gamers are ok. :D

This threat though will never fully become realised as long as PCs aren't suitable for the living room. There really is a humongous demographic of people who buy 2-3 games a year and just want to switch on the system in front of the TV, no fuss, no hassle. Despite PC booming there is no tangible impact on Playstations userbase as of yet.

I agree that it would be stupid to expect the Switch to outsell Wii, DS, and PSP combined. That's the kind of beancounter logic that people that try to claim "the console market is shrinking" use. You can't expect 1 console sold to always = 1 user. And if that one user no longer needs 3 different consoles to play his videogames why would you expect sales of console units to stay the same when multiple consoles die or become irrelevant? So if you want, just cut the Xbox losses by 25%-50% and expect Sony to make that up in gains on the PS5 sales. 

How do you expect the PS5 to be outselling the PS4 when it costs $200 more than the PS4 did in 2018? It's already 2 million units behind, and the economy in the US is not doing very well. Is there going to be a larger tail end for PS5 sales than PS4? Is the console market somehow growing and PS5 is the only thing to really satisfy that itch for a properly powerful console? I'm not saying you're wrong or that I'm right. I just want more of an explanation. If PS5 somehow did wind up selling 130 million lifetime then I wouldn't have any ground to stand on and would just give up the argument. At least unless PS6 somehow had an unlikely Wii U like failure the following gen. 

PC handhelds don't need to sell a ton because the storefront of Steam is already there. On the flipside a game console that fails means a failed storefront. Didn't the PS5 have a profit margin of 6%? And wasn't that why they pushed PC ports, because they wanted to wring a little more profit out of their videogame business? Also, profit isn't everything. Keep in mind that PS1 and PS2 never had online fees to charge people. PS3 online was free for a while. And games are released digitally, so they can't be resold. Bragging about profit while ripping customers off at every corner and then claiming that a device is "more successful" than a predecessor that charged fair prices isn't an argument I would want to make. 

As for Xbox, MS can say whatever they want about it and it wouldn't matter. Xbox profit is a rounding error compared to their PC business and Xbox doesn't have its own separate section on their financial reports. Xbox is bundled in with the Moore Personal Computing segment of their business, which includes a massive amount of non-gaming PC revenue, as well as services revenue. On top of that Xbox is a third party publisher now, so good luck separating the profits of Bethesda, Actiblizz, and Forza games not sold on an Xbox from Xbox proper. It's all a massive tangled mess. 

To figure out how much money Xbox proper makes or doesn't make, you would need to force Microsoft to be broken up into multiple companies. They would have to be Bethesda, Microsoft, Xbox, Activision, and Blizzard. Unless you did that, any claim of Xbox being this profitable or that profitable is pointless. 

If PS5 indeed winds up selling 130 million units, then I would call that growth. As Kyuu rightfully pointed out, you can't combine Wii, DS, PSP, 360, and PS3 sales and then claim the console market has shrunk since then. 

Ok yeah you're right. Xbox users would tend to gravitate more towards PC even if the offerings of Play Anywhere were 20% of their library because that still beats PS5's which is nearly 0%. 

Any company that threw it's hat into the ring would need to do several things. First off the system would need to be able to play PS5/XB Series 3rd party games with some level of competence greater than the Switch 2. Second, it would have to be a system that had a good price to power ratio. Third they would need to release 3-4 best selling peices of exclusive software a year. That's the most difficult part. If it were me, I would just aim for 60 FPS/1440p, simple shadow textures (instead of dynamically created), and no raytracing nonsense for my first party games. That way they would look great and be faster to create. Then I would include a way to upscale the games to 4K without using too much processing power.

Gain customers by making games $60 again and refusing to include Microtransactions or Online Fees. Make controllers that actually work for 30 years. No drift. Game-Key-Cards don't exist in actual storefronts like Wal-Mart or Bestbuy, but if you buy a game digitally you have the option of getting a free GKC or empty disc mailed to your house. That way all digital games can be resold or traded. You just have to deactivate your download and transfer the license from your account to your GKC or disc. Finally, I would include a heavy crossbuy feature where if you buy a game on our console and it's available on PC then as long as you still hold the license for that game on your console, then you can play it or transfer it to your PC.

Edit: Also bring back late-gen price cuts. A proper console should be $200 less than the launch price by year 5-6. 

In other words get rid of all the anti-consumer BS that plagues modern videogames and focus on good exclusive content.

@Cerebralbore101

The PS5 being behind the PS4 isn't a recent development, which is quite impressive all things considered. When PS5 got its first price hike years ago, I expected PS4 to extend its lead by a lot more than 2 million, and that the PS5 would eventually catch up due to a longer generation + longer crossgen period. PS5 is performing above my expectations (I originally expected around 140 million lifetime but my conditions were a PS4-like price trajectory and a stronger first party lineup. Little did we know that prices would keep rising instead of dropping. I also had no idea shortages would last for over 2 years!).

PS5 will definitely have a longer tail, and should be supported longer than the PS4 in both production and software. Sony implied longer PS5 support BEFORE the RAM crisis started. PS4 sales collapsed unnaturally because Sony initially wanted to convert PS4 players as quickly as possible to PS5. This is not how it's going to play out this time for obvious reasons. Sony would be moronic to launch a PS6 in 2027 and cease PS5 production (which is the only realistic way to give PS4 a chance of winning in hardware sales). A 2027 PS6 would be outrageously expensive, millions of lowend console gamers including the tens of millions stuck with PS4 would rather upgrade to a standard PS5 or a cheap PC. Every Playstation player stuck to PS4 is potentially a PS5 advantage (late PS4 didn't have "reserves" stuck with PS3 so to speak).The ecosystem itself is much bigger than it was during PS4's final days. PS5 can capitalize on this in ways that PS4 never could.

For your 105 million assumption to come true, the PS5 would have to ship only 8 million units this year, and another 4-5 million for the remainder of its life lol. It's plain silly in the context of GTA6 and future titles that will eventually leave the PS4 behind (Football, COD, etc).