PS5 News: The PS4 could be Sony’s last real console, PS5 a different concept
Hey, you’ve got to give Michael Pachter credit for making bold statements. A few days ago, he announced at DICE that this generation is the last Real console cycle.
PS5 might not sell as well as the PS4
GamesIndustry report:
“The console installed base is as big as it’s ever going to get, [this] generation is not going to be bigger than the last generation. We’re going to be about the same.
“The Wii U is going to sell 20 million units compared to 100 million for the Wii. The PlayStation 4 is going to sell 120 million or 130 million – that’s great. The Xbox One will sell 100 million to 110 million – that’s great. Add it all together and it’s 260 million units, maybe, and the last cycle was 270 million.”
Does this mean no PS5 will ever come our way?
Well, not really. Pachter clarified:
“This is the last real console cycle, I don’t mean that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will go bankrupt and shut down – they will not. Each of them will make another console, some people will buy them, and the next console cycle will be to this console cycle what the 3DS is to the DS. The 3DS is selling about 15 million units a year, the DS had five consecutive years where it sold more than 26 million. So about half as big.
“So when I say that this console cycle is the last console cycle, the reason is that console games shouldn’t require a console. And I’m not talking about the cloud.”
Come on, wouldn’t you like this PS5 in your living room? (concept art by David Hanson)
PS5 will exist, but could be a different concept from today’s consoles
Pachter mentions that all you need to play video games is a screen, a controller, a CPU, a GPU and some storage. By the time this console generation nears its end, “you’re going to have a CPU/GPU in your house that is connected to your television,”. GamesIndustry mention it could be your smartphone, or a set top box such as the Amazon Fire TV.
This does not mean the death of console gaming according to Pachter, but rather its renaissance: consoles, as devices, are a shrinking market. However, gaming as a market, is expending. when a $100 device such as the Fire TV lets you play call of Duty, there is no need for a dedicated console anymore.
As such, the PS5 could be not necessarily a console, but a service. A combination of online servers and stores such as the PSN, applications for your smartphone or your dedicated TV box (Fire TV or others).
Pacher added, if you remove the need to purchase an expensive console to access games, this could dramatically increase the number of player. Many people in their 30’s would love to play a specific game, but would not buy a console for it.
Ha, at least if the PS5 is not a physical device, this would reduce “out of stock” problems of the current generations at launch 🙂
PS5 is still a thing!
My take on this is that the PS5 is still a thing. It is likely Sony and Microsoft will expand their gaming offer as services, as they probably make much more money on the service (PSN, etc…) than console sales. I would still imagine that a limited number of “dedicated hardware” PS5 devices would be manufactured, if only for the geeky collectors among us (raise your hand if you own 2 PS4s just because you love that glacier white Taken King version)
Oh man. This guy again? His loves a online concept. Multi service bs. His say so much sh%×# that MS follow his “prediction” in a first time for a console without a disc reader and almost lose all the market. Shut out your fu#$! mouth. No body care.
Because people who don’t have high speed internet in their home, don’t exist. Also, hardcore gamers believe that a few milliseconds of lag are not relevant, and probably improve their gameplay if they effect it at all, since more lag is better. Having powerful technology in your home is much less sexy than someone else having it and letting you use it from long distance. Having your own toys is for losers.
Unfortunately I don’t think this person thought it through. As there needs to be a dedicated console for sony/microsoft/nintendo to really get any money out of it. If there was no home console, what would be the point in having separate set-top boxes that streamed games? Both would perform exactly the same and would be really pointless in the market. Consoles are going to stay and so are exclusives. It’s a necessity.
It will at least be true for handhelds. 3ds was doing bad when it started and the Vita never took off. Smartphones (even though the games are completely different) are popular among the casual gaming peasants. Companies have to go where the masses are…
Well , i agree with his idea , the next generation will be different
Three words: PC Master Race!
4 words: personal computer master race…
That’s 4 words PC (Personal Computer)…
Well to be honest this guy isn’t a complete idiot. like many gamers will assume do to there love for games.. He is simply trying to think realistically because of the progress smartphones and any other tech has been making in the industry in this decade.
Don’t forget kids: It was only 10 years ago that no real smartphones were out. And all that existed 20 years ago with any real graphics at the time were PC’s and 2D based games. And 3D was nowhere near what today’s ‘3D’ is now.
“3D Monster Maze was the first ever game released on a commercial games machine that was in 3D. It was developed by Malcolm Evans in 1981 for the Sinclair ZX81 platform. The game awarded points for each step the player took without getting caught by the Tyrannosaurus Rex that hunted them in the 16 by 16 cell, randomly generated maze.”
“The first Symbian phone, the touchscreen Ericsson R380 Smartphone, was released in 2000, and was the first device marketed as a “smartphone”. It combined a PDA with a mobile phone.”
“Long before the smartphone revolution, IBM and BellSouth teamed up to build and sell the Simon Personal Communicator, a 1-pound, $899 mobile phone that ran apps and featured the first touch screen. It lasted just six months after being put on the market in the summer of 1994.”
Leason over. . Class dismissed.
Don’t forget to do your homework.
“Or forget all anout it and just GAME!”
“Learn get smart and rich.. Or don’t and juat stay unintelligent and broke.”
😉
We already have that. It’s called PC gaming. We have steam, origin, uplay and gog.com.
“The Wii U is going to sell 20 million units compared to 100 million for the Wii. The PlayStation 4 is going to sell 120 million or 130 million – that’s great. The Xbox One will sell 100 million to 110 million – that’s great. Add it all together and it’s 260 million units, maybe, and the last cycle was 270 million.”
This only means that Nintendo f-ed up with its current gen console while the other 2 manufacturers didn’t.
“So when I say that this console cycle is the last console cycle, the reason is that console games shouldn’t require a console. And I’m not talking about the cloud.”
…and then he says that we’ll be playing on our TVs using CPU/GPU/storage from our phones. I’m not saying that the dude went bonkers, but their (highly specialized) hardware is not able to compete with gaming oriented hardware of consoles. And will never be, it’s just economically insane.
What I’m seeing is that the next console generation will be PC-compatible, which means backwards compatible with current gen. This also means every worthwhile game will be ported to PC unless held back by console exclusivity deals.
TV+console hybrids have no future, streaming from the cloud has no infrastructure.
Consoles are here to stay.
Sony is pretty *** at both customer service and developing a digital service so that’s something from them I will never be interested in.
Im awfully tired of people treating Patcher’s BS like some kind of prophecy. To make matters worse he article title was misleading too
I don’t mind buying a console or two every five – six years. heck people change phones every year and they are as much or more expensive. Computer enthusiasts renew their GPU and other parts frequently and expending a lot on the process. Why is this itch of trying to ditch consoles ? sure they haven’t sold as good as previous gen but they are not even halfway their life cycle and there is still people clinging to last gen(their fault for still supporting them). If anything companies like sony and nintendo just need to be innovative if they want to sell. And also that guy is forgetting that there will be a totally new marked in five years with teenagers becoming adults and buying their own consoles. Just another stupid prediction to get attention, who *** owns an amazon tv? that thing is useless.
I guess there could be some truth to what he said. If many owners have more than one console, as you indicated at the bottom, then even less people are buying the systems. I have the original white Destiny bundle console and a 20th Anniversary console. I like the new Destiny version, but having to upgrade the HDD kinda turns me off to it, if anything I’d go for the Black Ops one. I really hope a physical console comes out though because as great as digital/streaming is, I really don’t like it. I prefer physical items to digital usually.
This is true, not for the reasons listed though. Next Xbox will run Windows, and there’s no way a console can compete with that.
Maybe the next home consoles would not be a console anymore, but more like to PC, in terms of size and capabilities, and probably with upgradeable hardware.
i love how PS4’S concept designs were futuristic AF but in the end PS4 ended up looking like a black block of plastic . xDD WAY TO GO PS5 !
PS5?! we are not even really into the ps4’s life cycle yet to even be talking about the PS5. But really I think this is a load of ***. If anything I think nintendo, sony, and microsoft will become one console no more console wars. Nintendo is already facing a pre-gen new console because of the failure of the Wii U which is debatable but if you lost your 3rd party games you lost the console war. People want a console that can do a lot more then just games these days. The Wii U should have had a Blu-ray/DVD player and media center. They need to get off this gamecube design which most people don’t understand that they been using the same architecture for almost 15 years.
But saying the the PS5 will be software? You need to lay off the drugs dude.
Personally I think this is backwards.
Latest generation of consoled did not sell as well because what you really get is a REALLY limited, under performing,and overpriced preset PC with software shackles on it. Back in the days when PS2 or PS3 was released – their cost to performance ratio was unmatched by any PC within the same price range.
The next generation of consoles should do exactly that – offer a preset, dedicated , high performance device that would be both – outperforming the current generation of PC’s, smart phones, tablets, at a lower price and remove all software limitations of those devices to allow the users to fully utilize the devices potential.
This just doesn’t make sense. Video game companies make money by separating themselves from the competition; it would not be beneficial for them to switch over to software and services, leaving hardware up to third parties. Simply put, there is no way that third party hardware is going supply all the features desired by the major gaming corporations. (Especially Nintendo, who passionately insist on hardware that is different and innovative.) Gaming companies and dedicated gaming consoles are about creating the best game experience and pushing the limits. You CANNOT do that with a $100 media streaming device. Yes, it has “a CPU and a GPU”, but that doesn’t mean they’re nearly powerful enough to satisfy what true gamers are after. They also don’t have the expandability to allow massive storage, multiple controllers of all varieties, etc. If you wanted to add these features… Well, you would end up with a much more expensive piece of hardware. So much so that you would have some set-top boxes catering to casual gamers, and high-end ones that are more like a… dedicated gaming console!
While I agree that gaming companies will continue to expand their services, and hopefully that will open it up to more hardware options… There will continue to be new dedicated gaming devices for the foreseeable future, because there is a market for it. They don’t need the new console to sell better than the previous generation, all they need to do is make advancements and earn as much as they put into it.
This is a lot like how the job market works… You have a lot of people working in one department, then some advancements come along and we realize there is an opportunity to dive deeper in specific areas. Thus, specialization comes about. We continue to get more and more specialized either until advancement stops OR something else comes along to make a job irrelevant.
Set-top boxes have not made video game consoles irrelevant. They don’t provide the same experience, and they never will. These are two different types of hardware that are specialized for different purposes and cater to different audiences. We’re not merging the two unless people suddenly stop caring about high-power gaming, and I don’t see that happening for a long, long time.
I have the Ps4 Killzone with 2 Dualshok 4, the cam and the game.
Also i have the Ps4 Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain, the red one.
Wololo, yes you are talking about the cloud. Cloud servers providing services. By the way, next generation is just “PlayStation” platform.
they should do different concept in handheld, not in home console.
So many people in the future may give up gaming if this would become true for reasons that are hard to me explain and some not so
as soon as I seen Michael Pachter, it made the entire article pointless.
The guy is a blockhead to say the least.
I like the idea, next generation is going to be a HUGE flip. The problem is that it could either succeed, or flop miserably. I’m glad they said “Not necessarily a cloud”. There needs to be an offline solution. There are SO many more offline users than these companies think. Same goes with non-HDMI television users.
So the future is no fixed hardvare (with the same fixed performance for everyone), instead a fragmented ecosystem of hardware (like PC and android)?
I am lucky that I have my trusty PSP and the NES / SNES / GBA emulators written by some wonderful people.
Proud to have lived in 80s when 2 of the bests consolle ever made bz the mankind (Sega Genesis and SNES) ruled thw whole world. I’ll miss them when the era of homegaming will end.
think smartphone and tablet will kill everything.you just connect your smartphone via hdmi connector to your led tv and then connect your gamepad via bluetooth from smartphone and viola you have a console.i believe the gpu cpu and battey smartphone wiil become great every year.
For now, You can’t have a console that only supports online content. What about thise people who wants physical stuffs?
This guy is a freaking IDIOT…Consoles are not going anywhere……There is still a huge market for physical media….Sony (hopefully) learned their lesson with “digital only” distribution with the PSP Go (yea, I know the PSP Go was released at a different time than modern consoles with bigger drives, faster networking, etc..). But there is no shortage of people wanting games on physical media. There are people that refuse to buy digital only games. I buy all my games on physical disks (unless they aren’t available on physical disk, games like Shovel Knight for example) There are some games that get physical releases in Europe or other countries that are not available as a physical release in the USA and some people would rather import them and wait for shipping rather than download a physical copy. Physical copies of games, IMO, are better. You have something to show for your money, physical copies can be sold or traded. You can also loan games to friends and they loan you something to give both of you something new to try. If you console breaks and you have to replace it, its easier to just install the games than download them over the server (provided they don’t get pulled off the servers, that is). If I wanted digital distro games only, I’d build a gaming PC and buy all my games thru Steam….
so maybe console-makers wouldn’t focus much on their console making… but instead… will focus on making quality games and that would be awesome 🙂
like how I wish pokemons would somewhat be walking in front of me… hehe
He is a complete c@ck… Why anyone would even listen to him is beyond me.
Hi,
I think there must be need to an offline solution for the game because there are many third world countries in the world which has not high speed internet for playing these interesting games. It’s very expensive for them to afford the cost. That’s all the reasons I believe must effects its sales as compare to PS4. but still there are many fans of PS4 games who are not able to afford it price.