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The recent PS5 blackout campaign, which made waves on social media a few weeks back, appears to have had very little impact on the console's usage rate — at least in the US.
This is according to ever-informative Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who writes that "there was no significant change at all in player count or engagement" during the blackout period.
Piscatella's data is based on Circana's own tracking methods, which are obviously fairly reliable given that the company provides said data to clients across the industry. The only real caveat is that the information is limited to the US alone.
The blackout was originally conceived in protest to Sony's decision to cease the manufacturing of physical PlayStation discs. As mentioned, the cause attracted a lot of support across social media following its announcement.
The initial campaign took place between the 23rd and 30th August, but later on, there was a call to carry out the protest indefinitely, with players urged to unplug their PS5s for the foreseeable future.
It was never wholly clear just how popular the blackout would prove to be. There are around 93 million PS5s out there — based on Sony's most recent sales data — and plenty of onlookers questioned whether word of the protest would spread beyond the kind of players who keep up with gaming news.
And even then, there was a lot of cynicism surrounding the whole thing. Even in the comments sections here on Push Square, users wondered whether the campaign would amount to anything more than social media bluster.