There are basically two camps in any discussion of the success of PlayStation in recent years.
Neither camp claims that PlayStation hasn’t been a success – the futility of that claim was underscored yet again this week as the company reported significant rises in revenues, profits, and user engagement across almost every metric of its business.
One side, however, attributes that success largely to Sony’s own efforts, especially the fruition of decades of work at establishing PlayStation Studios and its generally excellent pipeline of games.
The other side points out – uncharitably, if not entirely baselessly – that all Sony has really had to do for the last two generations was execute competently while its most direct competitor, Microsoft, slipped on every banana peel in sight like a painful slapstick gag that goes on for an uncomfortably long time.
Why not both? It’s certainly true that Sony has benefitted from Microsoft’s mismanagement of Xbox – the failings of the Xbox One have been well-documented.
The very competent design and rollout of the Xbox Series consoles (which remain, in hardware and services terms, genuinely excellent gaming devices) was completely undermined by the company’s seeming inability to effectively manage the stable of studios it was expensively assembling. Sony quietly benefited from every stumble, with Microsoft’s games ultimately ending up as best-sellers on PlayStation.
However, even if Microsoft’s errors were “push” factors driving people to seek alternatives to Xbox, Sony’s software pipeline remained an important “pull” factor that enticed them to consider a PlayStation instead.
There’s been some criticism of Sony’s first-party line-up this generation, and to some extent that may be warranted; you could certainly argue that the PS5’s first-party line-up isn’t as impressive as the PS4’s at an equivalent point in its lifespan.
Some of that is just down to timing; a lot of key studios delivered really major titles right at the end of the PS4’s lifespan and treated the ports of those titles as their first PS5 releases before settling in for a four- or five-year development cycle on their next big thing.
Some of it, though, is certainly down to strategic decisions: it’s not quite clear just how much damage has been done to the release pipeline by the attempt to get key first-party studios to focus on live service games, but it has certainly soaked up significant resources with no return thus far.
It’s not quite clear just how much damage has been done to the release pipeline by the attempt to get key first-party studios to focus on live service games
Such criticism may be reasonable, but it’s worth noting that it doesn’t change the nature of what Sony has accomplished with PlayStation Studios – and most arguments claiming that the PS5 has been a “disappointment” in terms of first-party games tend to resort to fairly bad-faith tactics like fiddling with the definition of “exclusive” to exclude games that were later ported to PC, or games that had PS4 versions despite PS5 being the lead platform.
This latter point is especially unfair; extending PS4 software support was a good thing to do in light of the stock availability problems that dogged the early years of the PS5, and now using that as a stick to bash the console for a “lack of exclusives” is absolutely in bad faith (and the same people would no doubt have screamed blue murder if Sony had cut off PS4 software releases back when people were struggling to get their hands on the new console).
Regardless of how you think Sony got into this position, the end result is the same.
As the company’s financials made clear this week, its gaming business is in rude health and the PS5 is, for all intents and purposes, the de facto home console as the industry enters the back half of 2025 and approaches 2026.
Its key challenges come from systems with quite different formats and use cases – expensive gaming PCs, the mostly-handheld Nintendo Switch 2, and the marginal but arguably rising threat of PC gaming handhelds are all rivals to watch, but none really threaten PlayStation on its home turf.
That’s an especially important position to hold as we go into 2026, because in commercial terms at least, that’s going to be a very important year.
There are a fair few big games on the calendar, as ever, but none are as big as Grand Theft Auto 6, which is shaping up to be pretty much the entertainment media launch of the decade, at least in terms of revenue.
If Sony had one commercial mission for this generation, being established as the default home console platform by the time GTA 6 launched was it; absent any shocking last minute reversals, that mission appears to be accomplished, a success that will likely be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to the company.
It’s not the only reason that 2026 is an important year for the console market, though.
It was widely reported this week that Hoyoverse will discontinue PS4 support in Genshin Impact next year – but this is not an isolated move, with many other operators of major online and live service titles also eyeing up the timeline for dropping PS4 support.
Some of those decisions will be accelerated by technical concerns (Genshin Impact’s huge, streaming game world is especially awful on the slow hard drive that shipped in the PS4, and benefits massively from the SSD in more recent systems), but the tipping point is already in sight; installed bases of newer systems are high enough for lots of companies to start turning out the lights on PS4.
If Sony had one commercial mission for this generation, being established as the default home console platform by the time GTA 6 launched was it
In theory, that move should start to drive a lot of late upgraders to make the leap to new hardware. While some of the affected games will probably have Switch 2 versions, so Nintendo will also be a beneficiary, most upgraders will probably follow the path of least resistance to a PS5, giving Sony another uptick in its installed base.
One potential fly in the ointment, though, is pricing. In the past, delaying your upgrade to new hardware was an economic decision – by deferring the upgrade you could pay a lower cost for the hardware.
In the last generation, that advantage almost entirely disappeared; now it’s entirely gone, with consoles not only holding their price tags through their life cycles, but even getting price bumps to keep their real cost in line with inflation. What that will mean for late upgraders is hard to say – it didn’t seem to hurt the PS4’s late lifetime sales too much, but the PS4 didn’t have to contend with such a tough economic climate for consumers.
Ah yes – the elephant in the room. Sony is executing well, it is capitalising on the failures of its rival, and within the games business, the planets are aligning for a very very good 2026 for the company.
It’s hard to ignore the storm clouds gathering in the broader economy, though; the question of tariffs and their impact on hardware pricing, and the looming risk of a consumer spending driven recession in many parts of the world.
Sony is bullish about its financial prospects in its recent reports, but it does tacitly acknowledge that the risk environment has changed – most notably starting to break down its operating income into “before tariff impact” and “after tariff impact” categories in its financial figures.
In spite of the tough economic climate, the PlayStation business looks robust and Sony’s confidence seems well-placed.
It’s not that Sony is infallible – it’s made some major errors over the years (most recently, it just can’t seem to keep its badly scalded hands away from that burning hot live service stove).
Its track record for seeing off tough competitors and confounding naysayers, however, remains deeply impressive – and if the sun comes out in 2026, as all forecasts predict, then Sony will be exactly where it needs to be in order to make hay.
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