Next PlayStation Is Three Years Off, Sony Says (wsj.com)

Don't hold your breath for the fifth-generation PlayStation. From a report: Sony wants to spend three more years readying its next videogame move [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the head of the PlayStation business said Wednesday. That would mark a slight slowdown in the six-to-seven-year update cycle for the console since the first one in 1994. The PlayStation 4 went on sale in 2013 and has sold more than 79 million units. [...] Speaking to a small group of reporters, Tsuyoshi "John" Kodera, who took over last October. said the network-services side of PlayStation is changing the way Sony thinks about product introductions. "We need to depart from the traditional way of looking at the console life cycle," he said. "We're no longer in a time when you can think just about the console or just about the network like they're two different things."

Comments

Re:Upgrade Fatigue

[OrangeTide]

if you want to play the new games, you kind of have to have the new console.

What if everyone kept their game consoles for 10 years and kept buying games for them? Would game studios still produce new games? I think yes, if there was money in it for studios and if the console licenses permitted it.

The upgrade cycle is intentional and very artificial. It doesn't represent consumer demand but it is organized by marketing. In exchange we get new whizbang graphics, better physics, more realism and ultimately better immersion.

But if you play games because you like the mechanics or you like the stories they tell. Then more powerful hardware isn't strictly necessary. For games that don't need beefy hardware I think we'll see more and more market share going to mobile games as long as nobody gets sick of the manipulative quasi-gambling freemium model that plagues the current mobile industry.