PS5 Simply Can't Match the Pace of 2023 in Europe

Needs GTA 6 to move casuals along with sports games to not go on last gen. Also needs a price cut

@get2sammyb in the previous generations they were happy to take a hit so that they can reach more customers (and make a profit from software sales). This generations they've adopted a Nintendo strategy, which is quite disappointing.

It's damning that the Xbox Series is declining slower than the now 7.5 year old full price Nintendo Switch.

With two SKUs, one at times cheaper than the Switch.

And yeah, it's percentage of sales decline, but let's be real, the Xbox Series wasn't exactly outpacing the Switch in units last year you'd figure.

The lack of big hitting console releases will account for some of this.

But it’s only natural after selling 50million that it will start to slow.

PS5 is almost 4 years old now. The "Slim" model should be reduced to around $400. Especially after the release of the Pro.

When Sony released the PS3 slim, with a much lower price, the sales exploded. But after the success of the PS4, they got greedy.

It's over. Bring on the PS6 and another remaster of GTA5.

@Matroska It would be so hilarious to see them postponing GTA 6 release to PS6 just to make another GTA5 remaster for new generation in the meantime and sell it once again. Just to be sure EVERYONE got it.
These days it won't even be surprising, to be honest.

The PS5 Remaster of TLOU pt.II that “Nobody asked for” is outselling every single new release this year in Europe except Helldivers 2. That puts it ahead of Dragon’s Dogma II, Tekken [number], Persona 3 Remake, Like a Dragon 8 etc. etc.

@get2sammyb the moment they reduce prices. Alongside Europe, Asia will also have a huge boom in sales.

Places like India jump up in sales with price cuts.

In Japan, The average Capcom newbie earns 300k yen, a PS5 is 60000 yen. It's really a luxury.

It has to be noted that 2023 was pretty insane in terms of big releases. In comparison, 2024 was always going to be a bit slower. Once Sony's first party output increases (hopefully next year), I think they'll see an uptick in consoles sold. Maybe in combination with a PS5 Pro launch.

@ChrisDeku I feel with Playstation there is a huge amount of negativity being driven just online while those who like the the games are just enjoying them quietly.

It isn't like Nintendo where even their average games or even a weak Direct will be hyped to moon and people online will make fanart etc.

Wrt to the Last of Us hate, it is just online nonsense from people who just really wanted Factions 2 (it is fair to be upset about that) or the new IP that's been rumored for ages. Most normal people just enjoy the game.

@Steel76 it’s been 4 years already??🥱🥱 wake me up when this generation starts 😴😴

@breakneck your math can’t possibly be right.

60k yen is roughly £300

300k yen is roughly £1500

They have to earn more than £1500 a year.

@Steel76 don’t forget MS also raised prices, because at least this time round there was a genuine reason.

But yeah they could perhaps be dropping to at least the original price.

@get2sammyb yeah, I get that, but considering how first party games get tiny price cuts now and how they used to lose quite a bit on each console (remember ps3? I think there were times they were losing $200 on each console sold at a certain time), this new approach gives me the impression they're too focused on making a profit that they forget the bigger picture.

@RagnarLothbrok
Sometimes it has a price cut in the UK for a couple of weeks by about £80, they then fly off the shelves.
The problem is once the price goes back up to normal price some wait for the next price reduction sale before buying.

I do think both consoles are over priced in the UK though generally.

@naruball You're implying that the PS5 was different from other generations in that they weren't losing money on each unit sold. By all acounts, that's not the case, they still launched the console with a loss on each unit.

It's just that in other generations, costs decreased sufficiently to allow a price cut and still break even later in the generation. That simply isn't happening with the current global economy.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I was shocked as well but it's true.

As per GamesIndustry.Biz:
It is also making a big increase to starting salaries for new graduate hires in fiscal year 2025, rising their base pay from ¥235,000 ($1,590) per month to ¥300,000 ($2,006) – an increase of 28%

Japanese AAA devs earn nothing compared to European devs and American devs while also having a worse work culture.

@get2sammyb I think they are focused on profits especially considering inflation. The gaming industry as a whole has not kept up with inflation. And let’s be real, the PS5 and series consoles aren’t bespoke or special like all console generations up to the PS3/X360. In which consoles had bespoke designs and were state of the art briefly. Since the PS4 they just released Mediocre machines for the time period. So Sony must make money on hardware for as long as possible with this price point. The COVID era increased manufacturing costs for every industry in the world. As the west has an over reliance on one region. For semiconductors it’s China and Taiwan. The Covid era saw massive delays and extreme demand for SOCs for all industries. And we are still in a post covid economy. So unlike previous generations a price cut may come much later or maybe not at all.

@naruball @get2sammyb Reduce the price? Didn’t Sony actually RAISE the price of the new discless version while keeping the disc version the same? After 4 years.

To point out the “prices are never going lower” factor look at controllers. 4 years after launch the $70 controller now has a few $75 colored variants, a $200 version, and several 3rd party $150 controllers, there is not one single 3rd party faux controller either by a known 3rd party like PowerA or some unknown knockoff. I’ve been looking for like a year. As I’ve taken apart 2 of my controllers to clean them to fix the drift. (Meanwhile my 2 PS4 controllers are still perfect after a decade.)

I’m honestly surprised there hasn’t been a “collusion” lawsuit in the US over the lack of 3rd party controllers, that’s how strange this is to me. A year or 2 okay, takes companies awhile to reverse engineer things, but 4 years and no $40 or $50 cheap knockoffs? That’s not normal.

@rjejr Let's not forget, Fony INCREASED the price of the PS5 by £30 for everyone except you 'mercains.

$500 console and $70 games in this economy is a bit too much I think. At this point in ps4 life sony already decrease the price of ps4 console, we need a cheaper and smaller ps5 slim, not more expensive one.

@wiiware Even the PS4 Pro regularly reduced to about £300.

Switch decline was expected as everyone that wanted one has got one and the next gen box is just over the horizon.
XBox - well, what can you say? Shot themselves in the PS4 era and keep doing it over and over again.

Sony are just profiteering - entire point of the not-very-Slim is that it was supposed to be cheaper to manufacture. They haven't even reduced the price of the PS4, it's still at £260. That should be down to £200 by now, with a free game.unless doing that will hurt fatty sales?

@breakneck oh per month then yeah that’s like minimum wage.

But still ps5 is affordable

Still waiting on those Sony first-party games myself.

At this stage I wouldn't be surprised if they're holding them back to push alongside the unnecessary PS5 Pro with "improvements" to get people to buy it.

No mention of 2023 being a record breaking year for how many PS5's were sold? Ofc sales are down, as others have said it is time for a permanent price cut, maybe alongside the Pro if that's actually a thing and Cod should've skipped last Gen this time round as well.

I know people are sick of hearing this. But the Pro needs to look completely different. Hardcore gamers might not care. But casual people who don't really care too much about this stuff are just turned of how this ***** thing looks. In my surrounding many people said "I just keep the PS4 and sit the PS5 out". Mainly because they don't want that ugly thing in their home. And it also doesn't help that almost everything is playable on the PS4 as well.
The casual people need to be excited about a new slick item. But they aren't with that white plastic bin.

Look at that list of top selling games and you discover the reason console sales are down! There is very very little of interest on the horizon imo. Gaming is in a rut of failed live service releases that fade into obscurity very fast. Sony seem to have drifted slightly from the path of the ps4 model. Thankfully we have elden ring dlc to keep me entertained.

This really is a bleak turning point for consoles in general. PS is DOWN double digits. Switch is collapsing due to EOL. Xbox hemorrhaged market in EU, but most interestingly, that didn't become market that switched to Playstation or Nintendo, people just rejecting Xbox should have meant surging numbers for PS, just as the Matrick 2013 collapse accounted for the lions share of the massive PS4 launch sales more than PS3 upgraders, this time it's market that just vanished from the console market entirely. Presumably into mobile and PC. Maybe Patcher was right in 2013 after all, he was just 11 years early.

Even for PC, the high end cards, while they fly off shelves, aren't produced in number, I think gaming has priced itself out of most markets across the board and the masses are opting for far cheaper hardware to run simpler games in general. PS3 games on an Arc are just fine. Hardware makers want the hardware to be premium and exclusive, game makers need to sell games to as many people as possible to survive....the two halves of the industry are eating each other alive.

@get2sammyb Yeah, Phil Spencer talked about the end of Moore's Law and it's effect on the hardware subsidy model as well. And Jensen Huang declared that the high GPU prices are here to stay because the cost of the dies are just much higher, and there isn't really much improvement between generations now (of course, it's Jensen who says whatever sounds good at the moment without thinking about the fact that he basically told people they don't need to upgrade often anymore....) And AMD just isn't going to bother with high end at all anymore, not profitable. Hardware has really changed. And if Jensen's not lying (fat chance), it probably has huge implications for console generations too. In the RTX line, the top end cards (>$1k) tend to gain 50% improvement between gens, but the mid tier cards tend to gain about 15% (4070 Ti-S aside which is technically a cut down 4080, not a jacked up 4070). Hard to sell a PS6 that's 15%-30% or even 45% better than PS5 like they used to in the old days with 2-3x more powerful generations.

We may finally be at the time when "generations" really end and all consoles are "Pro"s.

@sanderson72 I think, and it's not a great mind blowing argument just common sense, that the US is the only place Sony competes w/ Xbox so they need to keep their prices low here, feels like everywhere else PS dominates Xbox. Maybe the UK but they can just blame that on Brexit. 😁

In Japan it's basically just Nintendo and smartphones at this point. 🤷‍♂️

So yeah, Sony caters to the US, but I still have to pay about 10% tax, so that $500 console costs $545, putting it a little bit more in line w/ EU prices I think.

I do miss the days of price reductions though. I understand inflation is real, but I bought my Gamecube, Nintnedo's last powerfully competitive console, when it hit $99. Not $199, just $99. PS2 for $199 I think. I mean they're really just toys to play videogames, why do they need to cost so much? A lot of people are playing HD-2D games and the like, a $199 console should be able to run those. 🤑

Anyway, I digress. 😜

@NEStalgia Funny, you ninja'd in when I hit the Reply button but your long winded rant about the prices of hardware must have already been in the internet ether b/c I touched upon it a bit. I mean mostly mine reads like I'm just a cheap penny pincher but what you said was what I was getting at.😁

"Maybe Patcher was right in 2013 after all"

If you are 11 years early you aren't right, just guessing. 😉
That said, if Xbox can cloud stream it's game on those pitifully underpowered Amazon Fire TV sticks (I've changed all of mine out for Roku's) then do we really need consoles at all? Can't we just USB-C to Displayport our phones in a couple of years like we do now w/ laptops? Wireless HDMI a few years after that?
We all need $500 phones, we don't all need $500 toys. 🤷‍♂️

@Ainu20 are they currently losing money on each console sold? If so, how much exactly? I'd be very interested in reading a source. Because that was the case consistently with ps3 and they never increased the price, like they did with ps5, no matter how the Yen was performing.

@rjejr LOL, yeah, it's become...I don't know a way out of this situation. Gaming spent 40+ years selling the idea that progress in gaming and the reason to keep buying is ever better graphics. Now we've hit the point where the hardware to improve graphics takes a decade to really show meaningful difference, producing games to really max said hardware costs more money than can ever be recouped selling games, and Nintendo just sells $1.99 mobile games for $59.99 on a $300 10 year old phone and people talk about it like it's the most amazing product ever.

I don't know how the industry fixes this problem. Consoles are doomed. Just ,as a total model, they're doomed, they can't sell "ever increasing power at frequent intervals" at prices people really want to pay anymore. VR would have been the out to have a unique feature that only their physical product can offer. Meta's doing that. It's kind of working but not anywhere near the scale the console companies are used to or the software companies need.

Cloud has its own issues. It doesn't work for everyone, everywhere, consistently. And, the scale of economy still applies. Rendering servers are still expensive. How do you charge enough monthly fees to cover the cost of running the datacenter to back it, before it's too much for average people to pay? $20 on fire stick still seems like too much.

Nvidia kind of does it right. It's basically console rentals. You buy your games on steam or xbox or whatever like normal. You rent their cloud PCs for like $200/yr for a 4080 rig, less than that for a 4060 rig, that gets upgraded when the next gen comes out. Considering the 4080 is $1000-1350 by itself, and the rest of the rig to run it would be like $1200, $200/year with upgrades included when available, and not having to tinker yourself, is a pretty good deal vs $2200+ for the rig. And their streaming is way better than Xbox.

But is that price model sustainable? Well, maybe, if you're nvidia, where a $450 BoM 4090 is sold for $1600 retail....the cards cost them nothing for their own datacenters.

IDK, but I see the current direction, consoles aren't sustainable. It's a solid business for now, there's still enough market, but I expect that the market keeps eroding too. The more powerful the laptops and phones everyone already has gets, the closer to PS4, PS5 they become, the less anyone will need "more powerful" hardware ever again, let alone bespoke dedicated machines. Cloud may do it, but it depends on pricing, and I still think $20/mo kills Xbox on Amazon Fire Stick. IDK what Sony will do to maintain relevance in that world. Convincing someone to shell out $600, 700, whatever they'll charge for a PS6 is going to be a hard sell when you've got people with 20278 phones and laptops that play fortnite just fine, and you've got 5090's on the other side for those that need "muh gfx." PS will be fine for a while doing what they're doing, but they've got to be wondering if the numbers drop. PS6 won't have a lockdown sales surge on anything because it exists to bolster it. And even if Xbox exists, that's only like 35mil new customers.

The industry needs to innovate instead of feeding us the same slop what is the point of owning a PlayStation 5 when half the games can run on a PlayStation 4 even the exclusives are not new or different experiences

Such a odd fixation on console sales it doesn't effect gamers one bit just play the games you like let share holders worry about profit margins

@naruball That's absolutely not the reason why console prices aren't coming down. There are two factors at play here: firstly, the pandemic caused both a massive increase in demand for integrated circuits (ICs) and a total meltdown of the global economy.

While demand has receded somewhat, large language models training has kept it in a much higher water mark when compared to the last decade. And as for the global economy, the structural damage caused by covid (or by the response to it) was ultimately somewhat permanent (or very long term).

But the real reason is, funnily enough: physics. Transistor sizes have just got to a point where we're actually approaching the limits of the atom. Granted, we're not there yet, but the closer we get to it, the harder it becomes to shrink it further. And by "harder", I also mean "more expensive".

In other words: die shrinks (e.g. the SoC in the PS3 fat to the PS3 slim) used to make ICs cheaper, but now they get more expensive with each new node. That's the current reality, and there's no escaping from it. For now.

@NEStalgia I think I’ve been paying too much attention to politics lately - just recently found out that Joe Biden is old 😱 - that I only understood about half of that.😂 The part about Nvidia, the new IBM/Intel/MS. (Have you noticed lately that money seems to have like no meaning anymore, $30 billion here, $50 billion there, most people probably can’t even count that many zeros.🤑)

I don’t really like streaming, at all, especially companies trying to sell you part time rentals as full price games (should be illegal and no I’m not joking) I was just using it as an example about things making consoles obsolete. Sony is selling a $200 Wii U Gamepad, why CAN’T it work over the cloud?🤷🏻‍♂️ Sony needs consoles though, Nintendo sells handhelds with TV out and MS sells PC, Sony has consoles, that’s it. Maybe the Portal is test? VR is as niche as niche gets, I can’t even be bothered.

Certainly feels like something has to give. Maybe the PS6 can work as a home phone for people who miss having a landline? Media discs are dead, can’t use that secondary function. It’s inevitable. Some day Pachter will be right, maybe in his lifetime.

@rjejr I think Brexit can be blamed for most problems in the UK, unfortunately.

Consoles have always been built to a price. However, with the Tub o' Lard, I'm getting the impression that Cerny went a bit over the top in what he wanted to create and the bean counters then came along and made it cheaper.
I mean the DriftSense (thanks for the term @nomither6) seems to be made out of the cheapest plastics and the number of replacements/repairs because of drifting sticks and broken triggers seems to be off the scale - certainly way more than any generation of DualShock. Yes, they broke eventually after a LOT of punishment, whereas the DS5 seems to break as soon as you look at it,

Sony peaked at the PS3/PS4 era and then it seems to have stagnated.

There are maybe a few real PS5 exclusives that are not on PS4 or PC. Console prices are also not dropping mid generation like they used to for lots of reasons. PS5 is still way better overall experience than Xbox now but consoles are not what they used to be.

@RagnarLothbrok £299 and maybe GT6 release at same time = 🔥🧁

It's so sad to see terrible games like call of duty and FC consistent top charts when they both have consistent terrible ratings on steam and the microsoft store, R6 siege doesn't deserve to be on there either because that game lost it's way the year Ela was released and they didn't fix her for like six months.

@rjejr What I don't get is how no one seems to get that nothing is right economically. People just parrot "well inflation and everything needs to go up!" Does nobody understand the fundamental instability in the entire bifurcated economy? Did we really need to go back to 1928? Did we really need an 10th term of Carter?

Streaming is fine, or can be fine. It's never as nice as local hardware of course, but it can be decent to good. Not Xbox's streaming, that's garbage tier. And yeah, that model Nintendo uses where you pay retail price for a game and then only get to access it on a streaming service is insane. Or Stadia for that matter. There's really something disturbing that anyone is ok with that. Pure Netflix subs like the Xbox model is fine. The

Nvidia streaming model is actually pretty cool. You're not actually paying to rent game streaming, you're actually paying to rent the actual PC, more like renting Amazon cloud servers. So you buy your games full price like normal on Steam or Windows Store, or whatever supported storefront. When you access your rented space it's just linked to your Steam/MS account and runs the supported games that you own on your rented PC space.

So unlike other subscription services, if you stop subscribing and buy your own hardware you have all your games, you bought them all on normal storefronts. It just comes down to if paying $$$$$$$($) for hardware or renting it works out better.

Portal is hysterical. The streaming handheld that can't stream. Somehow everyone hated WiiU even though it had games literally everyone apparently wanted to buy twice. Meanwhile everyone loves PS Portal even though PS5 games don't sell.

VR's definitely super niche, though I admit, the more you look into Meta, the less niche it feels. Sure they've only sold like Xbox numbers, but that's not so bad. And there's a million mfrs making accessories for it like iPhone. It can't be doing THAT bad!

But yeah, physical discs are the glue that held console together. Pushing digital was a double edged sword. They got more profit in the short term, but they negated their anchor by moving away from physical. Once they went digital their ecosystem and convenience factors compete with mobile and laptops. And over time, mobile and laptops get more powerful. It won't be long before EVERY new laptop runs any PS4 game. Sometime soon after mobiles will too. At what point does console having the only differentiator be "even MORE powerful graphics processing than a few years ago!" While studios struggle to make said games already? I see the market rolling BACK in graphics instead of forward. Consumers want to pay less and are fine with simpler gfx, studios can't afford to keep making gfx without jacking prices beyond prices consumers already reject. Selling "moar power" is over. Unless you're Nvidia. Then you do whatever TF you want because you're Nvidia, and you're busy designing gods.

@sanderson72 "Sony peaked at the PS3/PS4 era and then it seems to have stagnated."

No, they peaked with PS2. It's kind of been a downhill slide since then. PS3 was fantastic if you're "in the know" but was kneecapped in many areas. PS4 is overrated only because during that generation it was basically the ONLY console. WiiU was AWOL and Xbox was waiting for the healer to come resurrect it, so "Gaming" = "PS4" to most people during that time. But the console itself was nothing special, it was a loud, hot box made out of the cheapest plastic ever that looked recycled when new with a tablet processor that was weak before it launched. It just looks good next to PS5 that took all the problems of PS4 and then also removed the exclusive games.

@sanderson72 I've had my PS5 for about 3 years, our 3 controllers less than that, and the 2 I bought after, red and purple each for $75, both drift. The purple unplayable and the red just annoys me trying to open chests in Fortnite. I've taken them both apart to clean them and it did work for awhile, red is fine, but the purple became unusable again a short time after.

But both of my PS4 controllers work just fine, and they must be close to a decade old at this point, 9 years this Christmas maybe, pretty sure it was a family Christmas gift.

So yeah, Driftsense. At least Nintendo let me rerurn my drifitng Joycon FOR FREE to fix it. Meanwhile I can't even buy a cheap knockoff PS5 controller for $50 or $60, only $70 or $150.

It's really bad, and I'm greatly annoyed as you can probably tell. 😁

I feel bad for the Brexit folk, but at lest their recent election seems to have taken a turn for the better. I'm afraid the next US one will be our last. 😝

I think Sony has sold too many Playstation 5 that everyone who wants one already has one. And with being at the top the challenge is to stay there.

@Art_Vandelay yes it is.