PlayStation 5 launched in November 2020, and at time of writing it is a few days less than six months to its 4 year anniversary. That means we’ve been in this new console generation for close to four years, and in that time, millions of people have bought a PS5.
But there are also millions of players who haven’t made the jump. With the most recent sales numbers of the PS5 having shipped 59.3 million units and the report that there are 118 million active PlayStation players as of March 31, 2024, it’s been pointed out by Stephen Totilo that half of the PlayStation audience is still playing on PS4.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1791088357268689048?s=46
There were a lot of barriers to players upgrading from PS4 to PS5 back when it first launched. The pandemic causing manufacturing issues across all industries meant that Sony just couldn’t make as many PS5’s as they wanted, so less sold – even though all the ones they made were selling.
It’s not just the console’s scarcity that slowed down people upgrading. The fact is that there have still been plenty of high-profile releases from PlayStation and third-party publishers that straddle the line between PS5 and PS4, releasing on both consoles.
All together it makes a lot of sense why people haven’t upgraded. There aren’t a lot of games fully taking advantage of the new hardware, and while there’s definitely a performance boost to be had on PS5, if you don’t care about any of that, and if the games you want release on PS4 as well, then there’s little reason to upgrade.
No doubt though there will be a spike of console sales whenever Activision decides to make the next Call Of Duty game current-gen exclusive.
But that still won’t do anything to move players on games like Fortnite, Roblox, Apex Legends, Overwatch 2 and Destiny 2, where there’s no sign that PS4 and Xbox One players will be alienated from new expansions.
Source – [Stephen Totilo on Twitter via Kotaku]