Xbox never broke any gaming industry record. Nintendo and specially Sony did, but not every generation.
PS1, PS2, Wii+DS and in a smaller scale PS4, PS5 and Switch have been adding a meaningful amount of new console players. But Xbox has been losing them in the previous generation and particularly this one.
So it isn't a "console market" growth issue, it's just that XB is dying. But PS and Nintendo are better than ever.
There is also an issue regarding how the amount of console players are counted: it's done adding the players of each platform, not considering that an important percentage of players own multiple consoles of the same or multiple brands. But in any case, the console market keeps growing both in userbase and revenue despite many challenges like covid, huge inflation, fucked off global economy, retarded tariffs, people and countries having too large debts, issues getting components because virtual currency miners, AI servers or electric cars spiked their demand increasing prices (resulting on price increases and people being able to spend less money on luxuries like gaming).
This is not true, the factual data says that the console market is growing and that only Xbox is shrinking.
PS5 got more new users than the ones XB lost, more new users than the ones they got in PS3 and PS4.
What is particularly special in this generation is that 5 years into the generation, the percentage of PS players who continue in the previous generation is way higher than usual at this point. That happens because they continue getting great games, since AAA games take way longer to be made several top IPs and studios still didn't have current gen only main games, or that they continue engaged with GaaS and PS+ there that still continue getting support, or that they can't afford to migrate yet due fucked up personal economy (this generation having had price increases instead of price cuts didn't help).
The current gen only releases of new GTA, CoD, Bungie and so on should make a good chunk of this people upgrade to the current gen. Meaning, PS5 will have record hardware sales in second half of its lifetime.
No, both the gaming industry and console gaming industry continues growing in the amount of players at normal rates. In case of consoles, you also have to consider that console sales aren't the same across their lifetime, vary across their generations. Traditionally start strong the first year and keeps growing until peaks normally somewhere between their 2nd or 5th year and after that keeps decreasing until replaced by its successor.
Depending on each console case, that peak is taller or shorter, wider or shorter, and the tail after the peak is longer or shorter. But the pattern always is there. Right now we're in the post peak tail of Xbox Series, PS4, PS5 and Switch, and now Switch 2 just started. So it's a part of the generation where there are less console sales than in others.
Nintendo makes mobile games and apps, plus movies, theme parks, toys and so on.
But yes, all AAA publishers have been moving to focus more in multiplatform because AAA budgets need so. Nintendo game budgets are way cheaper and several of their games have huge sales numbers on their own platform, so don't have pressure to go multiplatform.
This generation doesn't need to be saved, Sony and Nintendo have been breaking records for a while without GTA6
We already saw games like Death Stranding 2 and so on
According to Sony PS5 is generating more revenue than PS4 and any other previous generation both in total and on average per user in:
- Hardware revenue
- Game revenue (full game sales + addons)
- Accesories revenue
- Subscription revenue
- Total user average spent
- Playtime
And 2M in hardware units isn't a lot, it's just around 2% or so.
.
