Sony’s PlayStation brand dominates 2021’s worldwide console market despite a component shortage restricting the amount of available PS5 consoles. Between console and game sales, as well as their online services like PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now, Sony has claimed just under 50% of the console market with the remainder being shared between Nintendo and Xbox.
How does PlayStation compare to Xbox and Nintendo?
Sony captured 46% of the console gaming market in 2021, a slight increase when compared to their performance in 2020. Thanks to the strength of the PlayStation Store and console sales, the brand remains extremely attractive to third-party publishers and developers according to Ampere Analysis (thanks GamesIndustry.biz). This gives them a fairly large lead when compared to their rivals. In comparison Nintendo’s share in the market decreased by 2% to 29% as Nintendo struggles with online services, game downloads and other in-game monetization options when compared to Sony and Microsoft. Xbox comes a very close third with 25% of the market, also getting a very slight increase.
Spending on console services like PS Plus, PS Now, Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch Online grew 20% when compared to last year. This was mainly driven by the success of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, especially with the inclusion of major day one releases, although PlayStation is rumored to be unveiling a rival to this in the form of Project Spartacus soon.
Retail sales have also dropped below 30% of the market share for the first time ever. PlayStation’s contribution to this wasn’t revealed, although it was noted that Nintendo is still the biggest contributor to retail sales. Ampere also noted that Xbox game sales have become increasingly digital thanks to the introduction of the Xbox Series S. Overall, the video games market was worth $60 billion in 2021 and this is only expected to grow despite shortages of the most recent PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles.
In other news, Capcom has announced they will be remastering Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 7 for PlayStation 5. Those who own any of the games on PS4 will be able to upgrade to the PS5 versions for free. Elsewhere, Ukraine has called upon Sony and Microsoft to pull their PlayStation and Xbox online services from Russia following the invasion of the country.
