As of the end of the second quarter of last year, the PS5 was apparently just behind the PS4 in terms of lifetime sales, 84.2 million to the PS4’s 86 million at that same point in the PS4’s sales.

However, going into and during the November/December holiday season, sales dropped off compared to last year - selling 1.5 million units less during the last fiscal quarter compared to 2024.

So overall, the PS5 seems to be in a pretty healthy spot, having sold more units so far than the PS3 did in its “lifetime”, but it has not done as well as Sony wants it to. It hasn’t sold as well as the PS4, and definitely hasn’t outsold it. And if the downward year over year sales trend continues, Sony will find themselves in hot water. With the economic downturn, sales of everything will continue to suffer, and I think something that will hurt the PS5 (and PS6) that a lot of console players don’t think about is that PC gamers tend to also own at least 1 console. Many PC gamers owned a PS4 and a PS3 as well. But, with money becoming an issue, they’re not going to drop their PC for a console. They’ll drop the console for the PC they already own and accept that they’ll miss out on the exclusives. And Sony already had issues with people not replacing their PS4s with a PS5. For years people simply weren’t doing it. So far there are only about 8 PS5 exclusive games that aren’t also out on PS4 or were timed exclusives that are on PC as well. And we’re 5 years into the PS5’s lifetime, which is usually a decade at most for console generations. That’s not a lot of incentive to entice people to give up their money for a PS5 for. Why buy a PS5 for 8 games when I have the entirety of my Steam library going back to 2007? Plus, PC has its own exclusives. Practically an entire industry of them. The sheer volume of indie games exclusive to the PC means that you could play a new game everyday for the rest of your life and never spend a single cent on any AAA studio.

One thing that you’re missing is why Sony games sold “poorly” on the PC, and that comes down to the port quality, the delay between console and PC release, and the price. Many Sony releases had/still have performance issues. And there was the PlayStation account drama, which probably hurt sales. Add to that that it’s at least an additional year before a Sony game comes out on Steam, and then they charge full console price. Is it any surprise why they “sell poorly”? PC gamers have already had to wait a year or more for the game, they might as well wait for a sale for it to be at a reasonable price. But look at a game like Helldivers 2. The PC makes up a major portion of the player base. There’s a reason that Sony said “single player” games, not all games. Games sell on the PC. PC gamers just aren’t willing to accept the quality for the price that Sony was offering for their tentpole games. If we base the size of the market on the total number of games downloaded last year, the PC makes up almost half of the PC/console market: 857 million downloads vs 626 million on Sony consoles, and 546 million on Xbox, for a combined roughly 2 billion total games downloaded in 2025. The PC market is no drop in the bucket by console terms. We won’t talk about the 52 billion mobile games downloaded last year.

Sony will try again if the PC market doesn’t go in on buying a PS5/PS6 like Sony hopes, which I don’t think they will. I don’t think it will be anytime soon, but the line needs to go up. Forever. They’ll cut costs where they can and increase prices as much as their customers will let them, but eventually they’ll turn to other options, and the PC market is a low-hanging fruit tempting easy short-term gains for little effort.

If for every 7 or 8 game copies they would’ve sold on Steam for full price, one person now buys a Playstation and a single game, this move is still profitable for them.

Now all they have to do is announce like 2 decent exclusives that launch a month or 2 before GTA VI and they’re golden. People suddenly have multiple games they need a console for (assuming they don’t want to wait a year or 2 for GTA VI, which will sell like hot cupcakes)

They’re not worth the effort. And better yet they just collect 8$ indie games they never play.

Once upon a time, video game consoles offered the convenience of plug-and-play gaming, and living room comfort.

Not everyone wanted to build a PC and play with keyboard and mouse, and even still playing those PC games can be a hassle to set up on a TV if you’re common-denominator-levels of tech unsavvy. (Read: not the average Lemmy user)

Valve has brought that forward some with Steam Deck and eventually steam machine but by and large most PC gamers are Windows users.

That said, console platforms have gotten so increasingly hostile towards customers between pricing, licensing, download times and walled-garden tactics that they’ve painted themselves out of an increasing chunk of the games market.

People would rather set up a computer and a controller than buy a console, and it’s the corpo’s own fault.

From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.

From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.

As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.

People generally buy consoles because they are very simple, plug-n-play devices. Historically, they’ve also been able to produce cutting edge graphics for cheaper than a gaming PC, and although that price gap has narrowed over time I do still think it’s true by a bit. (People like to point out that this is not true when taking into account the average price of games on console vs PC, which is completely valid, but I’m talking about the hardware alone here)

PC prices are also going up by hundreds of dollars. Look at what RAM and storage are doing.

Both companies are leaning hard on digital only sales. Between the standard PS5 shipping without a disc drive and Switch 2 cartridges being little more than download keys the physical retail market is in its last dying gasps. Steam handily has both companies beat in terms of game catalog availability and affordability. A few console exclusives might be enough to maintain steady sales, but it’s an obvious trend that PC gaming is gaining dominance with third party publishers.

nintendo is so reliant on pokemon, People are still buying the slop game freak is producing.

or Sony and Nintendo give up on physicals (as they seem to want to)

Sony was already very clearly migrating in that direction since the PS4, but didn’t go all in thanks to microslop shooting itself in the foot with the Xbox 1 reveal

25 years ago, they weren’t going to get any closer than the original Xbox did. PC gaming was extraordinarily different from what we know today, and much as you might not want to hear it, a lot of the reasons it got better were also because of Microsoft. The truth is we can only have something like a Steam Machine today because of incremental improvements that have been done over long periods of time. Valve basically started work on Proton right after the first batch of Steam Machines came out and bombed, and it took until 2022 for their next batch of hardware to materialize that made use of it. Closed platforms can fuck off and die these days, but they solved real problems for decades.

Their main appeals of “easy” and “cheaper” haven’t been true for years.

Please help me get a machine that compares to the PS5/XSX in terms of performance and cost. I’m being serious. Every time I look at putting something together it’s gonna be like $1500-$2000.

Consoles failing isn’t going to make PC gaming any better, though. It’s certainly not going to drive prices down. Though I’m not sure the inverse is actually true: hugely successful consoles with good competition isn’t going to drive component prices down.

Microsoft actually sort of did try that. The Xbox was originally (internally) referred to as the “DirectX box”; it was basically a computer stripped of all parts not necessary for gaming. Microsoft has been pushing DirectX and gaming technologies for decades. You’re right though, the games should have also been Windows compatible. I don’t know why they weren’t. Microsoft is going that way now, sort of, with Play Anywhere games that, if you buy them on Xbox, you can also download them through the Windows Store (which still sucks).