May 21st, 2022, 12:03 AM
Although the 9th generation of consoles is still young (it'll only hit the two year mark this November or 5 if you include the Switch in this gen), the generation before is well known for being one of the longest generations with an eight year gap between PS4/XBO and PS5/XSX (I'm not including Nintendo solely because they have been on their own timeline since the Wii U).
I can't recall if any of the companies said they didn't want to repeat the length of the 8th Gen, but considering the chip shortages that have plagued production and availability of consoles for the last two years I wonder if this generation will be forced to last longer because either trying to produce a new console or more of existing ones isn't going to be easy, or because sales of PS5 and XSX aren't as high as they could be and so the generation will last longer to allow those systems to make up sales impacted from the supply shortages.
To look at sales so far, PS5 sits at roughly 10 million units (I can't find numbers for XSX), while the PS4 comparatively sat at around 14 million at the two year mark. Over its lifetime the PS4 sold 113 million as of 2020, and the link shows how fast the sales start to spike during year three and really take off in the years that follow. I don't think PS5 will manage that with the way supply issues are still going on, but I can't decide if Sony would keep it going longer to make up for it or happily cut it short if they get something put together to justify a PS6 release. Microsoft I really can't tell because their focus is on Game Pass rather than hardware, so maybe they won't even be bothered about XSX sales that much.
What do you guys think?
I can't recall if any of the companies said they didn't want to repeat the length of the 8th Gen, but considering the chip shortages that have plagued production and availability of consoles for the last two years I wonder if this generation will be forced to last longer because either trying to produce a new console or more of existing ones isn't going to be easy, or because sales of PS5 and XSX aren't as high as they could be and so the generation will last longer to allow those systems to make up sales impacted from the supply shortages.
To look at sales so far, PS5 sits at roughly 10 million units (I can't find numbers for XSX), while the PS4 comparatively sat at around 14 million at the two year mark. Over its lifetime the PS4 sold 113 million as of 2020, and the link shows how fast the sales start to spike during year three and really take off in the years that follow. I don't think PS5 will manage that with the way supply issues are still going on, but I can't decide if Sony would keep it going longer to make up for it or happily cut it short if they get something put together to justify a PS6 release. Microsoft I really can't tell because their focus is on Game Pass rather than hardware, so maybe they won't even be bothered about XSX sales that much.
What do you guys think?