We have enjoyed the PS4 for some time and most gamers surely expected Sony to continue releasing upgrades of the product but the company came out this week to announce that it will not be producing any gaming consoles till 2021.
On May 22,2018 during Sony’s Corporate Strategy Meeting, PlayStation boss John Kodera said the PlayStation 4 is entering the end of its lifecycle.
While sharing Sony Company’s three-year roadmap highlights, he said that Console sales are not expected to be a major source of revenue going forward.
This is not as bad as it seems as the company continues to reap revenue from subscription services such as PlayStation Plus 2018 which can compensate for the decline in the hardware sales.
Sony goes ahead to highlight the increase of PlayStation Plus subscribers that have increased from 20.8 in 2016 to 43.2 in 2018 (60% growth) hence a reliable source of revenue for the company.
Sony plans to capitalize on that by adding new games and creating exclusive game franchises to further increase these statistics.
Sony is not discontinuing the PS4 anytime soon and is expected to sell 16 million PS4 Consoles during this year. However, this is a decline from last year sales that stood at 19 million which shows the product sales are not performing well as expected.
The Play station 4 has performed quite well in its first years citing sales of 79.8 Consoles by March 31, 2018, in about 4 years since rolling out the product in November 2013 whereas it took PS3 (launched in November 2006) 7 years to reach 80 million sales of its consoles in 2013.
The life cycle for gaming consoles seems to be growing over time, with the longest period of 7 years between November 2006 with (PS3) and November 2013 (PS4). In addition to this, Sony took 8 months to release PS4 consoles after announcing the product, so we could again wait until the next release, possibly PS5 to be available.
In its prospects, Kodera says the company aims for 100 million monthly active Play Station Network users who currently stand 10 million more than the 70 million active users recorded in 2017.
Speaking to Sean Kasansa, a gamer he told SautiTech that “I think PS4s have had their time. The PS4 pro is going to have less than two more years to sell, and in 2020 we will finally usher in the next generation.”
Until March 2021, PlayStation will “crouch down once” to grow further in the future. The PlayStation 5 — or whatever Sony’s next platform ends up being — is at least three years away said the chief of PlayStation. So don’t unplug your PS4 just yet.
In addition to this, Sony’s Interactive Entertainment America CEO Shawn Layden said earlier this month that the company won’t be making any hardware announcements at E3 2018.
So in Sony’s E3 201 that is due to place early June in Los Angeles, we should not expect any hearing about new hardware especially from Sony’s Gaming section but we should expect on four big games to be launched during the event.
