Half of All PlayStation Gamers Are Yet to Upgrade to PS5, Sony Stats Reveal
With the PlayStation 5 entering the second half of its life, figures from Sony indicate around half of all current PlayStation gamers are yet to upgrade to current gen.
As pointed out by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Sony announced this week that PlayStation has 118 million monthly active users (MAUs), up 9% year-on-year, but around half of those are still on the 11-year-old PlayStation 4. PS5 has sold over 59 million units since going on sale in November 2020, and it has yet to see a price cut. Infact, Sony has raised the price of the console.
Speaking to the investment community (as reported by Totilo) Sony president Hiroki Totoki painted a rosy picture of the situation, saying MAUs will steadily increase as PS4 players eventually upgrade to PS5, but as Daniel Ahmad, Director of Research and Insights at Niko Partners, pointed out in a tweet, the transition from PS4 to PS5 has so far been “slow.”
On console PlayStation Network MAU’s have barely grown since the PS5 launch.
It’s just been a slow transition from PS4 > PS5
So, why have so many PS4 gamers held off on upgrading to a PS5? Or, perhaps to put it a better way, why are so many PS4 gamers content to stick with the console they have?
Mat Piscatella, Executive Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana, suggested in a tweet that the most-played games in the U.S. are all currently available on the last generation of consoles, and that’s enough for most people. These games (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, GTA 5, and Call of Duty), are all available on PS4. “Any console that can play a majority of, or all five, of these games will be just fine for many people,” Piscatella commented.
This is not a situation unique to PlayStation, either, Piscatella added, as it affects all consoles. IGN has already reported on tumbling sales of the Xbox Series X and S, which looks like it will struggle to outsell its predecessor, the much-maligned Xbox One. Microsoft’s answer includes bringing its Xbox games to rival platforms,
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