We are just days into the year of 2020, a year which will deliver at least two new consoles, more cloud gaming and likely some counter-actions from Nintendo. What do the analysts have to say about this upcoming year?
That's exactly the question Games Industry let some major analysts answer in a recent article, where the most interesting answers come from the NPD employee Mat Piscatella. Piscatella thinks that both Playstation 4 and Xbox One will continue their decline from 2019, and Switch will also see a decline but still remain the best selling hardware - maybe even into 2022 despite the releases of Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X.
Apart from this, Piscatella stated that video game sales are really starting to see the impact of subscription services:
"Many early participating titles in subscription programs saw organic full game sales growth outside of the subscription services themselves, likely (at least partially) because subscribers suggested to friends and family to buy the game the subscriber was playing. However, we are seeing signs that this is changing, and perhaps subscribers are no longer telling those friends and family to buy the game, but rather to subscribe to the subscription service itself. We are likely to see a significant shift in mix between purchase and subscription players towards subscription services for those participating titles."
This basically means sales numbers are becoming less important, and we will have to look into other factors like numbers of players, subscription revenue and so on to get an idea of how video games are doing in the near future.
Are you buying less games because of video game subscriptions?