junkyfour

They should be bold because potentially the best years for the PS5 are ahead of it. They should be thanking their lucky stars that Microsoft is releasing a PC and will compete with Valve in that space. That leaves Sony as the only player in the console space. Switch 2 is competing as a handheld and…well…it’s Nintendo they really don’t compete with anybody and nobody competes with them—they are going to sell their handhelds. Speaking of Nintendo! Their success is based on a wonderful strategy. Release hardware underpowered by a generation and…guess what…make great games that everyone wants to play and can’t stop talking about and sell the hardware for a profit! Making great games has worked out for Sony and contributed to the massive success of PlayStation but they’ve been distracted with live service games the last few years to the point where they replaced a leadership team and tasked studios with making (live service) games they don’t know how to make. Here’s a winning strategy. Release the PS6 as an underpowered handheld in two years. It will sell out all over the earth. Support the PS5 at least seven more years. When component prices fall in three years say, stop producing the PS5, drop the price of the Pro and let that be the sole flagship for a few more years and throughout that time, this is most important, make great first party games, and make them without spending 300 million dollars! It can be done! Make If they want to be somewhat bolder swap the current leadership team with the prior. Bring back Shu and Shawn. Right the ship.

I’m not an economist or an MBA but this is what see. A large fraction of those on PSN still game on a PS4. If those are added to 90 million or whatever on PS5 what is that? 100 million maybe? Adding in those on Switch and Xbox I don’t see that having increased much if at all over decades. So the market is saturated. Why release new hardware, sell it at a loss or not sell well, and not change anything. It doesn’t make any sense. Make and sell great games for the next decade. Sony has the base.

It’s a triumph overall, even with its current issues though those definitely need to be ironed out soon. I understand the need to adjust the difficulty, but I hope the default setting continues to mirror the original release. I’d love to see a thriving competitive scene emerge, but that won’t happen until the input lag is fixed and features like private lobbies are added.

What I especially enjoy is letting the game run in demo mode with the curved TV filter on. It’s easily the best way to experience these classics. The feeling of being back in the Pizza Hut where I spent so much time in high school is perfectly recreated. Nostalgia heaven.

The only real frustration for me right now is that the audio cuts out after several minutes on PS5 when running in demo mode. This needs to be fixed.

If Sony stops making singleplayer games outright and shifts to producing only free-to-play titles then 100% of their revenue can come from live service games. They can do this immediately and have that to report to shareholders next quarter.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare I appreciate your post. Your questions are valid and I certainly could have been more clear.

I don’t believe a PS6 will achieve much for Sony, if anything. There have been many who have expressed that the current generation’s graphical power hasn’t yet been squeezed to its fullest potential. I read an article yesterday that shared that with some games released it’s even difficult to determine at first glance if it’s running on a PS4 or PS5. I agree with that as that’s been my experience. For example If I saw NBA 2K14 running on a PS4 and didn’t know any better I’d think that was a PS5 release.

Where we’re at, in my opinion, is a place where the hardware is great, not just good enough, fantastic, and there’s no need to upgrade. I see most staying with PS4 or PS5 if a PS6 releases, especially if the rumors are accurate and this is by 2028. Another issue is cost. There is a current report that PS5 is still selling at a loss. Given the price of the Pro then I extrapolate and say that either Sony has to sell it at a loss, or sell it at or above the PS5 Pro price, without a disc drive, and with accessories sold separately—to make a profit. (I want to add that the PS5 Pro was genius. It solved the problem of a dual SKU, there’s only one, if you want a disc drive you can install it yourself and pay for it, if not you’ve got your all digital console, which I believe the loss leader, and the high price tested the willingness to pay that price. Anyway, I digress.) so if they sell it at a loss they’re just losing money because that’s not growing the market. The person that buys that console is already engaged in the ecosystem. If the price is high enough for a profit the console will be dead out of the gate. See the PS3 at 600 dollars in 2006.

By quality I mean quality of the experience. I agree that Sony and other publishers have released games of exceptional quality, in polish and experience. I did not claim otherwise. My hope is that the focus will be on making the necessary investments for more incredible games going forward and avoiding disasters and multiplayer microtransaction laden slop that severely gimps the experience. I won’t list the failures in that regard, which are many, or the successes, which are substantial.

Hollywood releases slop. That’s fine. But you can’t make slop for 200 million dollars and expect financial success. You can release 30 million dollar slop and still make money, but if you want to make a billion dollars at the box office that movie has to be good and have significant reach. Then pocket the bank, it’s one and done, and move on to the next project.

Sony is gradually shifting away from a console-centric business model, and it’s not hard to see why. Growth has plateaued—not because profits are low, but because they’re no longer growing fast enough to satisfy investors. As of now, the PS5 has sold roughly 80.1 million units, while estimates earlier this year put the Xbox Series consoles at around 30 million. That gives us a current-gen total of about 110 million units.

At first glance, this seems like a decline compared to the last generation’s combined 175 million units (117 million PS4s and 58 million Xbox Ones). A 65 million unit drop might look like a contraction of the console market—but that would be a misreading. In May 2024, it was reported that about 50% of PlayStation Network subscribers were still using a PS4. That alone could account for much of the supposed shortfall. In reality, the console market hasn’t shrunk—it’s matured and stabilized.

This means the battleground has shifted. Hardware is no longer the endgame. The real money is in software and services. Console makers often sold hardware at a loss just to build a user base. Now that base already exists across PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Series consoles, and PC—easily surpassing 200 million players. Releasing a PS6 or next-gen Xbox too soon risks cannibalizing that base rather than expanding it.

So, where’s the growth going to come from? Games. But not gimmicks. Not half-baked multiplayer hooks or bloated live-service experiments. If this is truly a turning point, it could mark a renaissance for quality—where success depends on making great games and marketing them well, not just launching the next flashy piece of hardware. In that sense, we’re entering a phase much like Hollywood: you need a good product, and you need the audience to care. And for gamers, that could be a very good thing.

The core difference between Game Pass and streaming services lies in the nature of their value propositions. Game Pass relies heavily on third-party publishers to provide content, whereas major streaming platforms like Netflix were eventually forced into content creation. This distinction is critical because it highlights a structural vulnerability in the Game Pass model: Microsoft does not control most of the content that drives subscriptions. Netflix, early on, faced a similar dependency—its library was filled with licensed content from major studios like Disney. Licensing was extremely costly; in fact, The New York Times reported that in 2012, Netflix paid an estimated $300 million annually to Disney for content rights, a figure that was not sustainable in the long run (“Disney to End Netflix Deal,” NYT, 2017).

Netflix wasn’t profitable for much of its early content-licensing era. For example, in 2014 it reported just $267 million in net income on $5.5 billion in revenue—modest margins considering the cost of content acquisition. Ironically, Netflix became profitable at scale only after Disney pulled its content to launch Disney+, forcing Netflix to invest in and rely on its own original content. This pivot allowed it to control costs and IP, and in turn, generate more consistent and long-term value. As analyst Rich Greenfield noted in Variety in 2021, “Netflix became the Disney of streaming, while Disney tried to become the Netflix.”

Importantly, even now that streaming services are turning modest profits, those profits pale in comparison to the old cable carriage model. In 2023, Disney+ became profitable for the first time in its history, yet Disney’s overall revenue from streaming remained billions below what it earned from its legacy TV networks and theatrical releases. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Max, reported a slim profit from streaming in Q1 2024, but it still faced a $1.1 billion decline in year-over-year linear revenue. Bob Iger has acknowledged that streaming will never replace the earnings power of the old model.

There’s a broader warning here for Xbox and Game Pass. Studios that tried releasing major films day-and-date on streaming—such as Warner Bros. with Wonder Woman 1984—quickly retreated when it became clear that streaming alone could not recoup production costs. Films now return to theatrical-first windows because the economics demand it. Video games are similarly expensive to produce, often costing hundreds of millions of dollars per title. Attempting to fund them primarily through a flat-rate subscription model is unsustainable, particularly when Microsoft must pay publishers for inclusion on Game Pass. Even first-party development is not immune; Redfall and Hi-Fi Rush failed to materially move Game Pass subscriptions, despite high development costs.

Finally, Microsoft’s recent layoff of 1,900 Xbox and Activision employees and its increasing emphasis on AI reveal deeper truths: not only has Microsoft never succeeded in consumer markets, but it also doesn’t care to. The company is prioritizing capital allocation toward enterprise AI, a space it understands and dominates. Its abandonment of consumer initiatives—be it Zune, Windows Phone, Kinect, or Mixer—shows a consistent pattern of disengagement when results lag. Game Pass, however innovative, is just the latest example of a consumer-facing venture that cannot survive the cold math of cost versus return.

The allure of a handheld is self containment. I have no interest in a device that is a brick without internet access.

“The logic was actually hard to fault.” Then you should have talked to me. Just as consoles will always remain behind PCs in terms of graphical power, streaming will never offer the experience consoles, i.e. dedicated hardware, will continue to provide. Gaming experiences on consoles will remain superior to that offered by streaming services and I’m including uninterrupted gaming sessions. Internet outages and bandwidth throttling—intended or unintended—are common. Streaming services will never match the quality obtained on consoles. It will never happen. Now I’d also like to ask, what problem is streaming supposedly solving? Liberating people from the need for dedicated inexpensive hardware that’s readily available over a significant portion of the occupied planet? A laptop or pc is still required with decent onboard graphics. A monitor is still required. A high speed internet connection is required along with a powerful, expensive router. So guess what? Gamers will still need to remain home to play games. No one will be streaming Red Dead Redemption at the airport. That’s ridiculous. In any case, if I’m going through all the trouble and expense to ensure I have a great streaming experience and I’m that tech savvy, why not just buy a console and hook it up to my TV? And if I want to play a multiplayer game I will do it on a console or a dedicated pc because I am assured an audience and a stable pleasant experience. There are three reasons why streaming continues to be of interest to the corporations: (1) ad revenue, (2) subscription revenue, and (3) data mining to sell data to provide targeted ads to increase ad revenue. Consoles will remain popular for the next century and will continue to grow ever more powerful and provide mind blowing gaming experiences.

It should be called the PlayStation 5 (there’s too much brand recognition and value to not call it that and then there’s the “PS4 Pro” so a name is needed to clearly indicate it’s a new-gen console—see the confusion introduced by the “Wii” and “Wii U” naming nonsense), support significantly improved VR and VR controls, and have a UHD drive. I would like to play 4K movie discs. I’m excited about what was recently announced and hope I can get a PS5 launch day as I did with the PS4.

How could it have been “server stress” when the demo was essentially closed except to Access subscribers and those who preordered the game? I cannot imagine the numbers for either is large. “BioWare says that there were nearly 9 million hours of play across the 2.5 days the demo was open...” Note the avoidance of stating the number of PLAYERS. There are likely technical issues that have nothing to do with server congestion, in my opinion.

He wouldn’t have if it was an EA-made game.