PlayStation Network: other than the latest generation, half of the active users come from PS4

Stephen Totilo, journalist for Axios, highlighted a fact relating to the use of PlayStation Network which seems to have escaped most and which puts into perspective the impact of the current generation, that of PS5: the half of monthly active users they still come from PS4.

Of course Totilo did not invent anything, but underlined the official data of Sonyrevealed on the occasion of the company’s recent financial report, which spoke of 118 million monthly active users on PSN, half of whom have not yet made the generational leap.

The same event was the opportunity for Sony to reveal the updated sales of the PS5: 59 million units.

Generations are getting longer

The data is quite relevant because it not only shows that half of the current PlayStation players have remained with the old generation, but also how problematic the generational transitions, now that gamers can register accounts linked to a platform, using them to access their contents, even after the evolution of the platform arrives. Furthermore, many of them are expecting new content. Attention: it doesn’t mean that the PS5 is selling poorly, but only that, unlike what happened in the past, the online functions and the formation of more or less large communities around certain titles keep the old platforms active, even economically.

To demonstrate the validity of what he said, Totilo directly quoted the words of Hiroki Totoki, interim CEO of YES IS: “Cumulative sales of PS5 are 59 million+. Compared to MAUs, however, about half of people are playing games on PS4. So, we will manage the generation overlap well and increase MAUs.”

It should be noted that Totilo also asked his followers on X not to comment with the usual “bullshit from console war“, an appeal that we feel we must sign, given that there is no comparison at stake here, but only the acknowledgment that the transition between generations has become enormously longer and more nuanced than in the past, so much so that it is impossible for a hardware manufacturer not to plan a form of long-term support even for older machines, if they don’t want to lose millions of customers along the way.