Why in a ‘next-gen’ market like the current one is the old PS4 still so present?

If you are a console user and have not seen more than two generations arrive, those of us who have been around for a little longer can affirm without fear that We are facing the most eventful and strange generation of all those who have lived. It does not matter if we refer to one of the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s or the 2010s. The entry into the PS5 and Xbox Series X | S scenario has been one of the strangest and most precipitous that we will ever see, where the old machines They continue to receive dozens of news, despite their more than evident and irremediable decline. Now, what explains this mess?

Contents hide

1 Pandemic, crisis… everything!

2 Differences between PS4 and PS5

Pandemic, crisis… everything!

Indeed, the first reason that we can use to explain what happened has to do with the pandemic and, more specifically, with the consequences caused by its impact: practically zero drop in activity, problems manufacturing the necessary components at a good pace and a refusal on the part of Sony and Microsoft to delay at least one year the launch of their respective next-gen. That prompted a first big decision at the studios: do we work only for the new hardware or continue to support the old?

One only has to look at the sales figures for the years 2019 to 2022 to understand what happened. PS4, which is the one that really counts for the purposes of the generation that went on sale in 2013, remained well above the others in 2020, something that is not strange and that has precedents such as that of NES, which was the best-selling console at Christmas 1992 even though Super Nintendo was already in stores.

As you can see from the graph that you have just above, It wasn’t until 2021 that PS5 truly surpassed PS4 sales globallywhich is already an indicator that the next-gen he is applying the force of logic to prevail. But curiously, this routine did not result in something that we have always seen repeated throughout history, and that is that the drop in sales of the old-gen it would impact so little on the release schedule for her. PS4, to this day, continues to enjoy new features that in other times were barely limited to FIFA on duty and, if you rush us, to a call of duty filler.

Differences between PS4 and PS5

If we look at the PS4 sales figures for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, we see that they are very similar to those of PS5 except for the last year. While the next-gen Sony will close this 2022 with just over ten million units soldPlayStation 4 did it at the time above 15, without problems of stock and attending to the demand that was generated in a market with a powerful presence of PS3 still.

This being the case, we can blame the stockor the pandemic and the other crises unleashed in the world in the last two years, but the truth is that we are heading into a market where the lines between generations are increasingly blurred and companies are looking for brand client that it goes from one to another progressively, in the heat of news that continues to arrive for the old generation as well as for the new one when, on other occasions, that faucet had already been dry for quite some time.