How Long Do You Think Gen 9 Will Last?

[Moonface]

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?

[Karo]

I honestly wouldn't mind it lasting as long as last gen it gives time for the library to full out and push the console to its limit, but I do hope Nintendo will considering making the switch 2 something more powerful along the line of the current gen hardware so it doesn't struggle like it did with some modern games.

Now will it last as long? Part of me think for companys they want their hardware to be bought by the largest amount of people they possibly can and as time goes on the cheaper the hardware is for them to produce so I think its a pretty likely thing and they can keep introducing new models of the current gen until they feel they got their money worth out of this gen and move onto the next one.

[Mr EliteL]

A good five more years would be fine which will be taking it up to 7, although as I'm trailing and not on the train yet for the current gen, I'd be happy if it's 8 years again. Especially with the lack of console availability we've seen this time, as before you could just go into a game specialist store and get a PS3/PS4 or whatever console straight away most of the time.

[Moonface]

I honestly wouldn't mind it lasting as long as last gen it gives time for the library to full out and push the console to its limit, but I do hope Nintendo will considering making the switch 2 something more powerful along the line of the current gen hardware so it doesn't struggle like it did with some modern games.

I doubt Nintendo will ever make a system that's on par in power to what Microsoft or Sony offer at that same time. They have no need to when the experience they offer is completely different to anyone else and it brings them success.


I think even with the availability ignored this gen will be almost as long as 8th gen was unless Sony and Microsoft don't bother to release Pro versions of their current consoles, but I feel like what we have now is already able to do most things that decent PC's can do so the only upgrade we would get based on things now would just be increasing resolutions and allowing performance and fidelity modes to run together instead of being separate choices like they are now for games that offer it. I'd still want it to be a little shorter though because I feel like in the last year before PS5/XSX that the ceiling had been reached by most developers unless they were first party and had the ability to push one specific hardware harder than third parties could.