Yesterday we got an update about PS5 game exclusives, with Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios Head Hermen Hulst confirming that over 25 games are in development and almost half of them are new intellectual properties.
The same article posted by Wired includes other interesting PS5 details, though. For example, SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan released the following statement on Sony’s continued efforts to improve availability for the PS5 console.
We’re working as hard as we can to ameliorate that situation. We see production ramping up over the summer and certainly into the second half of the year, and we would hope to see some sort of return to normality in terms of the balance between supply and demand during that period.
Sony certainly hopes to have enough PlayStation 5 consoles to sell during the Fall season, especially gives that its big exclusive PS5 game for the year, Horizon: Forbidden West, is likely to launch in that timeframe.
Meanwhile, however, a spokesperson told Wired that the new console managed to sell 11% more game units than the PlayStation 4 in the first five months of their respective launches. User engagement was also much higher, with 81% greater time spent by PlayStation users logged in to the PS5 compared to the launch timeframe of the PlayStation 4 (between late 2013 and early 2014).
Granted, these figures have been clearly influenced by the COVID-19 induced lockdowns. In fact, the whole PlayStation ecosystem, including the PS4, experienced a twenty percent year-over-year increase in user playtime during the month of March 2021.
Analyst firms like Newzoo expect the global reopening to affect the console market in 2021, which should shrink by 8.9% compared to last year’s pandemic boom. However, Newzoo also forecasts that consoles should become the fastest growing sector of the gaming industry in 2022, mainly due to all the big triple-A game releases that have been delayed out of this year.
