Gen 9 Consoles – The State of Play
The Coronavirus pandemic has been guilty of many things, including mass disruption of economic supply lines. Making a shortage of chip manufacturing for electronic devices such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. On top of this, Microsoft are bolstering their Xbox Game Pass Cloud server blades with Xbox Series X hardware. Although this is a smart move because next gen games releasing will be playable via the cloud on Xbox One devices (among others). This will only make Xbox Series Xs scarcer as chips are set aside to be deployed in Microsoft data centres. You have to think too, with Sony deep in development of it’s Xbox Game Pass competitor, this will be affecting the availability of PlayStation 5 consoles too, along with the chip shortage.
PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles have been on the market now for a year and demand for the new hardware is still not letting up. In fact in my memory, it has never been so hard to find a ‘new’ console in stores or online. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X adoption rates then (despite reportedly selling well worldwide) are still very much confined to ‘the hardcore’ gamers or people with more money than sense (those willing to pay scalpers).
To help show this I am going to (at my own peril on Twitter) reference the latest UK games sales charts for both the Xbox Series vs Xbox One and the PlayStation 5 vs PlayStation 4. For more information on the recent chart data, see our article on UK game sales.
The key differences I am seeing here in this data, which can be fairly compared to global markets, are between 1st and 3rd party game sales. As you can see on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series charts, sales of 1st party games make up more of the top 5. A clear indication that adoption is predominantly still limited to the hardcore gamer audience, as we all know that multiplats tend to out perform exclusives from a sales point of view.
When next gen?
The vast majority of console gamers ‘normies’ spend most of their time and money on Fifa (UK/EU), Madden (US), GTA & Call of Duty. With the chip shortage set to last way into 2022, perhaps 2023 you wonder how will the industry continue to move forward?
It looks to me like cloud gaming could be the way for people to be experience next generation until they can get their hands on the sought after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. We already know what about Xbox’s offering in this area, with the likes of Redfall and Starfield available via Xbox Game Pass Cloud, day one. We know Sony are doing something too, and I fully expect them to showcase it around the time of E3 in 2022, perhaps even before.
For me, this begs the question… How long will the 3rd parties continue to release most games on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles? Based on what we know, it could be late 2023/ early 2024 before we see the likes of Call Of Duty, Fifa/Madden not launching natively on last-gen hardware. And who knows when we will ever see GTA 6.
E3 will be very telling. For games, trailers, release dates and which generation of platforms they will be releasing on. Could this be the take-off for cloud gaming? Heavy hitters such as Starfield and other developers wanting to use and push the new tech and further innovate, cloud gaming might be the only economically viable way to provide the desired ROI for studios. It would also give players some form of accessibility in market conditions massively restricted by supply and demand issues.
Cloud gaming set to take off?
In my most tin-foil hat moments, it definitely feels like it could be the first significant step towards a predominantly cloud based consumer base. I don’t think hardware will go anywhere immediately, but looking at things from a ‘normie’ perspective and manufacturing POV. Buying a new console every 4-8 years is an expense that many would happily avoid. And the console business model of selling hardware at breakeven or a loss, then to be subsidised by the sales of software; It’s easy to see why the margins of being software focussed would be lucrative to these big publicly traded corporations. Then operating the server blades with mobile-like iterative upgrades.
Despite this, I personally am all for cloud gaming. I feel it is exciting and i am one of those people who loves to be able to play my games when i want, on the device i want. But there is still huge work to be done before it is ready to dominate a hardware focussed industry.
By the time the next generation of gaming comes around, I expect cloud gaming to be far more prominent than it currently is, perhaps even more widely used than console gaming.
