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Comment by neocritter | Hacker News Reader

Is this one of those "we're doing great, you're fired" situations, or is there a real market reason? The PS5 seems to be selling well.

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They only recently announced that the PS5 is rapidly reaching its EOL. It is seemingly not selling well at all. The early issues with supply and the lack of actually interesting games that are not just remakes has clearly not helped.

It's selling well. It may not be "omg we are drowning in sales". Sony has also broken even on the cost of hardware within a year of hardware sales

In a company like Sony, where shareholder value trumps any other value, "omg we are drowning in sales" is the definition of selling well and anything less is seen as a problem.

I don't think that is what they announced, it did not reach their sales targets but they may have been expecting people to "upgrade" to the slim PS5 in those sales targets.

It could still be selling well by every metric except for a higher expected sales than it should be. Especially since they also increased the prices in a few markets.

They said it was entering its latter stage, which makes sense given it is been close to 3.5 years since it came out and their generations usually last 7 years.

It is selling pretty well too, I think I read even better than PS4 if you align their launches?

The PS5 is selling above PS4 at this time in their respective console cycles.

Despite a slow start it’s currently selling at a rate that would allow it to catch the PS4 which is the 5ᵀᴴ most sold console ever. I’m not sure what the guidance was, but even if they were off 4% this last quarter that still puts the PS4 ahead of the Wii by the end of its life.

I doubt a company would ever announce a console is EOL befor their next one is on the shelves. Are you sure that wasn’t about the PS4?

They announced that it is reaching „the latter stage“ of its life. Not that it has reached EOL.

> It is seemingly not selling well at all.

Yeah, it's only the 15th best selling console after all :/

Sounds like something else might be wrong if you can sell +50 million units and still not consider it "selling well" or making a profit.

Inertia. People probably bought the PS5 because they were happy of their PS4. My guess is the PS6 will be the nail in the coffin...

> Yeah, it's only the 15th best selling console after all :/

That's one way to frame it. Another is that the PS5 is the worst-selling Playstation console (non-handheld) ever. It has not met expectations at all.

I have PS4 pro and for as long as I tried to find one, there is not a single reason for me to upgrade. I bought a Quest 3 instead.

The Atari 2600 sold more units 40 years ago in North America than the PS5. They expected a lot better than the current numbers.

> lack of actually interesting games

I mean, it'd be great if Sony would get on board with allowing smaller devs to join the Playstation platform but the amount of literal gatekeeping that Sony keeps in the stable is disgusting to watch.

Hell, I'd love to be able to dev myself for it but nope! Sony gatekeeps me from running my own code on my own metal.

Tiny data point to support: when the PS5 first came out and for what I perceived a long time afterward it was hard has heck to get one, so I lost interest and put together another Windows gaming machine.

Never came back on my radar.

> They only recently announced that the PS5 is rapidly reaching its EOL.

They didn't "announce" this, I don't know why people keep parroting it. Why would a company say that about the console they're still trying to sell?

They said it was entering the latter stage of its life cycle. In other words, it's at the halfway point. And yeah, we're almost at 3.5 years which is the halfway point of the typical 7 year console life cycle.

It seems relevant that the company has scaled back its live service ambitions in recent months.

https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-commits-to-launch-just-six...

It seems many game companies thought they could build the next Fortnite/Destiny, but 1) it’s hard to start with that goal and move backwards, and 2) attention is a scarce resource, with most people only having enough room in their lives for a single live service game.

It's also very likely that live service revenue was unusually high starting in 2020, due to everyone stuck at home craving social interaction. So just like FAANG companies over-hiring during that period, the games industry was due for a correction.

It's interesting that you use Destiny as an example given that was purchased by Sony Interactive Entertainment and is one of their live services for which they are scaling back.

(It's also fascinating on a longer scale of history with Sony being a huge investor in Live Service Games as Sony Online Entertainment in the 90s through to 2015 and spinning that off to Daybreak Games in a previous lull in Live Service Games revenue. History repeats itself in strange echoes.)

London Studio and Firesprite were recently working on VR titles, and the PSVR2, while a neat product, does not seem to be selling well.

Playstation doesn't appear to be doing poorly, but it's hard to ignore that margins are likely worse than previous generations as AAA game budgets have skyrocketed. In fact, the lifetime sales of PS5 aren't that far behind PS4 (at the equivalent point in the PS4 lifetime).

IIRC the insomniac leak contained some internal slides that claimed at least ~6 million full-price sales of Spiderman 2 would be needed to break even on development costs.

They recently announced that PS5 is entering it's twilight phase. Sold better than series X but apparently not well enough. We're still getting new games released for both ps4 and ps5, and the value added on the latter appears marginal.

I only own a switch but if I had to buy a console right now I would buy a second hand ps4 over a ps5 and max out its internal storage. Much cheaper and huge list of games, many available for very cheap on the second hand market.

Can't the PS5 run any PS4 game?

Virtually all PS4 games. There are currently 6* PS4 only titles, none of which are especially noteworthy. *https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/support/games/ps5-backward...

There are other titles that are, at least last I checked, essentially unplayable on PS5.

Namely, Senran Kagura: Estival Versus. Graphics are glitchy enough it's not worth the trouble.

Which is a SHAME, because it was my favorite guilty pleasure on the PS4

What’s the price difference? $100? I’ve seen used ps5s sell for 250-300 in my area.

I got a PS5 last year (my first non portable console since the N64) and what I was expecting was the old feeling of playing with friends on a big tv. The only game I enjoy doing that in is FIFA/FC24. Unfortunately my gf is not into it. Other than that… not a lot to choose from. I ended up building a PC and now I’m considering selling the ps5. What’s the point of having this in the living room if I can only play alone? The games are basically the same now. Pc has more games, especially indie, I can also use the pc for other things, and I don’t have to hoard the living room for my individualistic activities. Also shooters with a controllers is just frustrating when you’ve played with a mouse.

Last time I checked they were more like 400€ but maybe it has changed. I haven't looked at it in recent months.

Sony is saying PS5 is entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’[0] while there are only 13 PS5 exclusive titles available [1]. So PS5 is propably not doing well.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-entering-the-latter-stage-o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga...

I spoke with some console game devs who worked with PS5 title: there is a major problem with AAA title development. Because the games have become so big, it takes 5 years to produce one. The console life cycle is 5 years as well. Thus, as a game studio, you can only cram one AAA title for each console generation.

Then you need to start from the scratch with new console, new SDKs, new bugs and so on.

Isn’t the PS5 just a juiced up PS4 at this point? How much is the SDK really changing from generation to generation anymore?

The life of the juiced up Gamecube (Wii) might offer some guidance here.

Someone should invent a game console that is modular so it can be updated as time goes on. It would also be wise to use a standard architecture, so that games remain compatible across different modular configurations. Call it something like "Parts Console" or "Personalized Console".

PS4 is selling at similar rates as PS5, at this point in the lifecycle they had similar sales.

That being said:

- sales have been inflated by pandemic

- most games are released on older gen consoles too

- PS5 has too little console-selling exclusives.

- Even of those that have, they are pretty much all sequels to PS4 selling games: spiderman TWO, horizon TWO, God of War TWO. Safe for Bloodborne all these first 4 years games got a PC release, so not really that exclusive

- Graphical generation jump is just "meh". Especially if you play on your sofa few meters from your TV, you're hardly to appreciate higher resolution, because besides higher resolution the PS5 only offers marginal graphical updates to games that you really need to look for (shades, reflections) and are highly dependent on the effort of the developers

For transparency, the number of PS5 exclusives has gone down because of Sony's strategy of porting some of their older exclusive games to PC [1].

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/playstationstudios

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