Back in 2022, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer revealed that Microsoft lost between $100 to $200 on every console sold.
For reference, Sony was recently boasting that PS5 sold over 80 million copies. This is terrible for Xbox.
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Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? "Everything is an Xbox", and they'll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they'll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.
Cause (people didn't buy Xboxes) and effect (Microsoft declared consoles over).
Steam won, btw. Not Windows. The next "console war" will be Steamboxes vs Playstation 6.
The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don't even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
Nintendo sells lots of games on Switch. The games industry in general don't.
And whose fault is that?
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won't let them go. Don't see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I'm sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they've locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I'm just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
Microsoft didn't have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn't gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.
I prefer facts to gut feelings.
Sony said its monthly active gaming users for the year ended April 1, 2025, were up 5% at 124 million users, which is the highest in PlayStation’s history.
Me too. That's a fact, but it doesn't refute what I said. It's a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn't. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it's behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can't convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?
EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as "an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future", emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it's counted in that same metric.
... I get that this is a REALLY important topic to you - but the article also explains how the PS5 is much more expensive (inflation adjusted) at this point in time compared to the PS4. That's very much part of "doing well".
Also, that the PS4 numbers are included is no different from the PS3 before - and your claim was that Sony was losing customers at that.
Take the L.
I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations' units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don't know that it has, but it's possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation's revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation's own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There's no L for me to take here.
Asus and Microsoft are by no means excluded from the game. Their ROG is excellent: powerful yet battery-efficient.
Because companies fucked up consoles. All we ever wanted was split screen games with our friends on the couch. Not a single-player-only Need for Speed for 70€ I can only play with an online subscription with random people over the internet.
They made consoles more and more similar to computers over the years, instead of focusing on the social character consoles used to have.
I've been saying something similar for years: Consoles going online was the worst thing to ever happen to them. Their selling point used to be that you'd put in a cartridge/disc, and it would "just work". Now it has all the downsides of PC gaming, with none of the upsides.
Unfortunately co op was killed by the constant pressure to have the next big graphical wank fest game.
