Console sales have been an important topic of conversation, with Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 5 battling for living room supremacy. It is clear that Sony is in the lead, but the Xbox has different plans for its future. With popular Xbox exclusives such as Forza Horizon 5 coming to PlayStation, Microsoft wants to become a purveyor of content instead of just hardware.Historically, the PlayStation 5 is about 7% ahead in sales within its first 52 months compared to the PlayStation 4. The Xbox Series is 19% behind sales of its previous Xbox One, a sizable margin. The more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro is the newest console to arrive, but at a more enthusiast level price point. Its sales likely don’t add nearly as much to Sony’s bottom line as its main PlayStation console which can be found often for cheaper prices than on launch.As cloud gaming gains in popularity and strength in technical polish, it is possible we will see hardware sales further decline in the future. The reasoning is that cloud gaming services do not rely on the hardware capabilities to power its games, become a Netflix-like streaming service for game content.On the PC side, gaming hardware has also been rocky in terms of sales. The latest graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD appear to be doing well on the surface, but there is a low inventory (compared to rabid demand) for most of the GPUs. The AI sector has gobbled up a lot of those resources that would traditionally head over to the enthusiast PC gaming market, too.
