PlayStation 4 Entering Final Phase of Life Cycle After 5 Years Since Its Launch

Recently at Sony Investor Relations Day 2018 in Tokyo, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera, said that the PlayStation 4 is currently entering the final phase of its life cycle. It has been 5 years since its first launch in North America and Europe back in November 2013 and followed by Japan later in February 2014. Since then, the console has shipped over 79,000,000 units as recorded on 31st March, 2018.

Though the PlayStation 4 is entering its final phase with expected negative results on sales, the membership services such as the PlayStation Plus should be able to mitigate the blow as noted by Kodera. With Sony investing on first-party IPs, they plan to refresh existing IPs and develop franchises off the successful IPs to strengthen their content.

With PlayStation VR still growing in the market, it is still lower than predicted which Kodera aims to produce a healthy growth for the platform. Looking at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s strategy for the fiscal year 2018, the company will continue to increase the platform’s install base and active users with exclusive titles for the PlayStation 4 and the recurring revenue from services like PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Store, PlayStation Now and others.

However there were no news on a new console mentioned despite the PlayStation 4 entering the final phase of its life cycle. Following the trend on the PlayStation console releases, it has always been a 5 to 6 year gap between each generation of consoles released; PlayStation at 1994 (slim model at 2000), PlayStation 2 at 2000 (slim model at 2004), PlayStation 3 at 2005 (slim model at 2009/ super slim model at 2012) and the PlayStation 4 at 2013.