If you’re a console user and haven’t seen more than two generations arrive, those of us who’ve been around a bit longer can safely say that We are facing the most eventful and strangest generation of all who have lived. It doesn’t matter if we refer to one of the 80s, 90s, 2000s or 2010s. The entry into the PS5 and Xbox Series X storyline | S has been one of the strangest and most precipitous that we will ever see, where the old machines They continue to receive dozens of new ones, despite their more than obvious and irremediable decline. Now, what explains this mess?
Pandemic, crisis… everything!
Indeed, the first reason we can use to explain what happened has to do with the pandemic and, more specifically, with the consequences caused by its impact: almost zero drop in activity, problems manufacturing the necessary components at a good pace and a refusal on the part of Sony and Microsoft to delay the launch of their next generation. This resulted in a first big decision in the studios: do we only work for new material or do we continue to support old?
Just look at the sales figures for the years 2019 to 2022 to understand what happened. The PS4, which is the one that really matters for the purposes of the generation that went on sale in 2013, has remained well above the others in 2020, which is not strange and has precedents like this NES, which was the best-selling console at Christmas 1992 even though Super Nintendo was already in stores.
As you can see from the graph above, It wasn’t until 2021 that the PS5 really overtook PS4 sales worldwidewhich is already an indicator that the next generation he applies the force of logic to prevail. But curiously, this routine did not result in something that we have always seen repeated throughout history, namely that the decline in sales of the old generation it would have so little impact on the release schedule for her. The PS4, to this day, continues to enjoy new features that in other times were barely limited to Fifa in service and, if you urge us, at a Call of Duty
Differences between PS4 and PS5
If we look at the PS4 sales figures for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, we see that they are very similar to those of the PS5 with the exception of last year. Whereas the next generation Sony will close this 2022 with just over ten million units soldPlayStation 4 did it at the time above 15, with no issues with Stock and meet the demand that has been generated in a market with a powerful PS3 presence yet.
That being so, we can blame the Stockor the pandemic and the other crises unleashed in the world in the last two years, but the truth is that we are moving towards a market where the boundaries between generations are increasingly blurred and companies are looking brand customer that it goes from one to the other as it goes, in the heat of the news that keeps coming for the old as for the new when, on other occasions, this faucet has already been dry for quite a while.
