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This has been the weirdest console generation. I'm still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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the pandemic really muffed it all up. The truth is that those product launches were lined up well before the pandemic truly began in March 2020, and it would have cost both companies an exorbitant sum to delay the launches at all. And really, they had no reason to believe that a pandemic would hurt their sales numbers, because the gaming market had never gone through an event like this before. And ultimately, the pandemic actuallly ended helping their sales because everyone was at home with nothing to do. The gaming market reached its highest revenue peak ever due to the pandemic.
I agree that it has made this whole generation feel weird as a consumer. But I think a lot of that feeling would be there with or without the pandemic, and the pandemic just exacerbated some things. Xbox is firmly in second place to the point that the PS5 is dominant, and it would have been dominant without the pandemic there. There are so few current-gen games, and even fewer PS5 exclusives, but this isn't because of the pandemic. We live in the age of crossplay and cross-platform, mostly caused by Sony and Xbox both moving to x86 architecture last gen, and sticking with it this gen. That common architecture makes it way easier to port games to other platforms, so it takes quite a lot of money to convince a dev to go exclusive these days. Why dev for PS5 only when you could also scoop up some money from PC gamers, Switch gamers, hell even PS4 gamers! The pandemic certainly hampered some dev ability to pump out first party games, but the bigger cause is probably the ballooning size of AAA game budgets. These games have become so massive and complex that it has become very difficult to pump one out faster than once every 4 years. The only thing I would pin mostly on the pandemic is the rise of PC gaming. PC gaming is at an all-time high because many took their pandemic stimulus as an excuse to finally switch to PC, and that has further fragmented the market in ways that definitely change the "vibe" as a consumer.
TL;DR: the pandemic was a factor, but I think most of the "weirdness" of this gen has come from other market forces.