PlayStation and Nintendo Switch Sales Diminish as Gaming Wars Grow

By Max Fried

The PlayStation and Nintendo Switch have been revolutionary in terms of gaming ever since their releases. Most recently, Sony has come out with the PlayStation five, and Nintendo has continued to release new and promising games.

However, even though these factors exist, their sales have fallen due to the gaming wars. The gaming wars are the selling competition between companies for their consoles/games. This all started when two Japanese companies stopped selling the consoles, some of the biggest companies in Japan, whose population buys a lot of video games. Another problem is that there is a global chip shortage, making it difficult to manufacture consoles and other tech devices.

The original units sold for the PlayStation five were expected to be 14.8 million units. However, due to the drop in sales and chip shortage, Sony has lowered its expectancy to 11.5 million units by the end of March. Sony’s company shares went down 6% in Tokyo, and they had an 8% drop in sales.

Nintendo has also confirmed that it will be challenging due to the chip shortage and reduced forecasts. They have also decreased their expectations for sales from 24 -25.5 million down to 23 million by March. Nintendo’s stock went down 2.8%, but the overall sales results were reasonably close to expected. Nintendo said, “The shipments of Switch consoles were not as bad as the market had feared.”

Even though things are difficult now, the gaming wars have only begun. Analysts have predicted that Microsoft’s (the maker of Xbox) buying of Activision Blizzard could be awful for Sony, which has been competing with Xbox for a long time. By buying Activision Blizzard, Microsoft can now add very famous games to their library, along with the 400 million players that play these games. Sony has purchased Bungie, which has many other games with its fan bases. Nintendo will most likely not be affected by Microsoft because they have their specific library. Nintendo said, “People who want to play Nintendo’s games purchase Nintendo’s hardware. Therefore, Nintendo can still differentiate its platform from others.