The fact that Sony themselves say that they're trying to compete with PCs and not XBoxes; the fact that Microsoft has straight-out said that the the concept of console generations is passé; the fact that this generation of consoles were all very PC-like, except for the WiiU, which flopped; the fact that none of the current generation of consoles is anywhere near Steam's 125 million users; none of that matters to these console evangelists. PS4's exceptionally good sales must be the only meaningful data point, right?
I disagree. And I'm not the only one.
From Business Insider:
The PlayStation 4 is killing it. Sony announced on Wednesday that it has sold 50 million PS4 consoles since the device launched in November 2013. All signs point to that being a good ways ahead of Microsoft’s Xbox One and Nintendo’s Wii U, which is no longer being made.
Considering that the PS4 arrived at a time when many onlookers said the home gaming console was in its death throes, that’s a very strong figure. But as this chart from Statista shows, it’s still a long way from its predecessors.
The PS4 has been on the market for a much shorter time, but it’s hard to say if it’ll ever reach the summit. The PlayStation 2 was many people’s main DVD player, the Wii hit the pre-smartphone casual gamer jackpot, and the original PlayStation was a breath of fresh air that stayed on sale for nearly 12 years.
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It's easy to forget that the PS2's record-setting sales were due, in large part, to PS2 being a cheap DVD player, and not just because it was a great game system. It also bears mentioning that neither XBox One nor WiiU made this "top 10" list, having been beaten by Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and Sega Genesis; PS4 is still some distance behind the original NES.
More interesting, though, is how this console generation compares to the last. PS2 is still the all-time highest selling console, beating the #2 finisher (the original PlayStation) by a whopping 54 million units, but the next three spots on the list are all from the last console generation. Nintendo's Wii was the clear winner of generation 7, but it was only 16 million units ahead of the PS3, which actually came from behind to edge out the XBox 360. That's 273 million consoles, pretty evenly distributed among the three big console manufacturers, in the last console generation.
This generation sees the PS4 at 50 million, followed by the XBOne at about half of that (Microsoft stopped talking about their sales numbers when the PS4 was at 40M and the XBOne was at 20M, and there's no particular reason to believe that they've closed the gap since). And the WiiU was selling only half as well as the XBOne when Nintendo stopped making it, leaving only 13.32 million units in circulation, total. That means that the consoles of this generation have managed only 85 million in sales or so, combined, with PS4's gains coming at the expense of its competitors.
Meanwhile, Steam has an estimated 125 million users... and has every reason to believe that those gamers will continue to game on Steam for the foreseeable future. After all, it's not like their current PC titles will fail to work on future PCs, meaning that they don't have to start from scratch building an entirely new library of games every few years. That gives Steam, and PC gaming generally, a kind of momentum that consoles can't match. No wonder Sony is making the PS4 as PC-like as possible, while Microsoft's XBOne straight up runs Windows 10 now.
XBox Scorpio is still coming, as is the Nintendo Switch, and both will sell millions of units when they launch, but I'm not expecting either offering to change the overall trajectory of this console generation any more than the PS4 Pro did. The movement away from consoles (which run on exclusivity) and towards Steam and Android (which run on open-ness) seems pretty clear by now; even the AAA PC games publishers have been unable to break this trend, with "walled garden" services like Origin and Uplay failing to lure users away from Steam; it seems like even PC gamers are only using those services to install the games that they're buying elsewhere, and not as the portal for all their gaming.
So, is this still the last console generation? I think it is, and I don't think that PS4's exceptional sales numbers change that, simply because PS4's sales are the exception, when it comes to console sales, and not the rule, while Steam continues to strengthen its hold as gaming's #1 platform, a hold that even Microsoft now seem unable to break.