PS5’s Success and Xbox’s Decline: The Race in the Gaming Industry

PlayStation vs. PlayStation Xbox; the two companies have a rivalry that can be compared to iOS and Android. They may be rivals, but at the end of the day you can enjoy being a user in either camp. Yet one party in the gaming industry seems to be completely running away from its competitor, just as Apple did fifteen years ago.

PS5 is selling like a charm

2023 was the best year for PlayStation when it comes to sales of Sony’s current console. The PlayStation 5 is expected to sell 50 million units after 2023, with 22.5 million units sold last year alone.

It’s a bizarre statistic, especially when you consider that PlayStation only had one exclusive release last year: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Yet it seems that the console manufacturer hardly needs to produce major games to encourage fans to buy PlayStation. to elect. The competitor is not chosen.

Xbox continues to flounder

There are no official figures from Xbox, but analysis agency Ampere shows that only 7.6 million Xbox Series copies were sold last year. That is also striking, because Microsoft’s console was equipped with numerous exclusive top titles in 2023. With Starfield, Hi-Fi Rush and Forza Motorsport leading the way, Xbox had a strong lineup.

It just didn’t translate into Xbox Series X or S sales. At least, not enough. Competitor PlayStation sold almost three times as many copies. It is as if the choice has already been made in advance for the casual player.

Microsoft

Game Pass ineffective

Microsoft has now been working on a new way to slowly win over fans for six years: Game Pass. The subscription, which allows you to play hundreds of games for a monthly fee, including major self-produced titles, is now even seen internally as the most important measuring instrument.

Still, the service’s success doesn’t exactly translate into fans buying an Xbox. Even with hundreds of games and exclusives available through the service from day 1, the mainstream audience is overwhelmingly opting for a PlayStation console.

In fact, the chip shortage made it clear that casual gamers would rather wait for Sony’s console than immediately get started with a next-gen console from Xbox. Even when the Xbox Series

Generation PlayStation

It all has to do with the generation that Xbox lost, namely that of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. At least, that’s what Xbox boss Phil Spencer said at Kinda Funny Games last year.

“We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everyone built their digital library of games”Spencer explains. “I see the commentary that if you just build great games, everything will change.”

Spencer continues: “It’s just not true that if we start building great games, you’re suddenly going to see a dramatic shift in console share.” At the time it seemed like a special idea, given that PlayStation managed to attract the previous generation with great first-party games.

Race run

Looking back at 2023 and the sales figures, Spencer may have had a point. Since the PS4 generation started in 2013, players have steadily built a library of games, the majority of which are still playable this generation.

Thanks to backwards compatibility, almost all games from the previous generation are playable on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. It is a huge advantage for PlayStation, because the choice for the console is quickly made if you had a PlayStation 4. Keep all your old games and play new games? Then you choose the PS5.

Even if Xbox offers more options for the player, pro user choices and often cheaper. In this way, PlayStation is becoming more and more like Apple. The smartphone brand is relatively expensive, somewhat pretentious in its marketing here and there and not very pro-user due to its closed ecosystem. Yet it is the most popular phone on the planet.

PlayStation is increasingly moving in that direction with its soulless State of Plays, peripherals that many consider too expensive, such as the PlayStation Portal and Edge, and the lack of high-quality games of its own making. And yet the sales success of the products remains enormous, just like with Apple.

2024-01-22 17:52:29
#Column #PlayStation #Apple #gaming