If you are a console user and you have not seen more than two generations arrive, those of us who have been around here for a little longer can affirm without fear that we are facing the most rugged and strange generation of all those that have ever lived. It does not matter if we refer to one of the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s or the 2010s. The entry into the PS5 and Xbox Series X | S scenario has been one of the strangest and most precipitous that we will ever see, where the old machines They continue to receive dozens of news, despite their more than evident and irremediable decline. Now, what explains this mess?
Pandemic, crisis… everything!
Indeed, the first reason that we can use to explain what happened has to do with the pandemic and, more specifically, with the consequences caused by its impact: a drop in activity practically to zero, 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 respective next-gen for at least a year. That prompted a first big decision at the studios: do we work only for the new hardware or continue to support the old?
One only has to look at the sales figures for the years 2019 to 2022 to understand what happened. PS4, which is the one that really counts for the purposes of the generation that went on sale in 2013, remained well above the others in 2020, something that is not strange and that has precedents like that of the NES, which was the best-selling console at Christmas 1992 despite the fact that the Super Nintendo was already in stores.
As you can see from the graph that you have just above, it was not until 2021 that PS5 truly surpassed PS4 sales globally , which is already an indicator that the next-gen is applying the force of logic to prevail. But curiously, this routine did not result in something that we have always seen repeated throughout history, and that is that this fall in sales of the old-gen had so little impact on the release schedule for it. PS4, to this day, continues to enjoy novelties that in other times were barely limited to FIFA on duty and, if you hurry us, to a filler Call of Duty .
Differences between PS4 and PS5
If we look at the sales figures for PS4 in the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, we see that they are very similar to those of PS5 except for the last year. While Sony’s next-gen will close this 2022 with just over ten million units sold , PlayStation 4 did so at the time with over 15, without stock problems and responding to the demand that was generated in a market with a powerful presence of PS3 yet.
This being the case, we can blame the stock , or the pandemic and the other crises unleashed in the world in the last two years, but the truth is that we are heading towards a market in which the lines between generations are increasingly blurred. and the companies look for a brand client that goes from one to another progressively, in the heat of news that continues to arrive both for the new generation and for the old when, on other occasions, that faucet should already have been dry of titles for quite some time.