PS4 Is Approaching The End Of Its Life Cycle, CEO Confirms

Rumors about a new generation of PlayStation consoles being revealed soon have been swirling around the web for months now and the company’s CEO just added fuel to the fire. According to John Kodera, the PlayStation 4 is approaching the final phase of its life cycle, which means that it is about to reach the tipping point between profitability and loss. It has been quite the profitable five-year period, as well.

According to the former CEO of PlayStation, Andrew House, Harvest Period of the PS4 started in 2015, Polygon reports. This was basically when investments were scaled back to reap the most amount of money via the profits. Fast-forward three years later and the console has been immensely profitable for the company.

The sales of the PS4 have been massive since its launch back in 2013, quickly coming out on top and beating its closest rival the Xbox One by a substantial margin. Its forecasted performance for 2018 isn’t any different either, and this is largely thanks to all of the high-quality exclusives that Sony has been putting out.

Although the company only expects to sell about 16 million units of the hardware, which is lower than the 19 million of last year, this is still a significant number of PS4 units. It would seem that the PSVR front hasn’t performed as well as Sony had hoped, but there is still some hope left that software sales will make up the difference in the low hardware sales.

This is likely what drove Kodera to tell Takashi Mochizuki, a Wall Street Journal reporter that the console is about to hits its expiration date. The reporter posted the comment on Twitter, which was met with mild reactions from fans who were expecting this anyway.

“PS chief Kodera: PS4 is entering final phase of its life cycle, which would have negative impact to the unit, but recurring revenue via membership services etc should cushion some of that,” the Tweet reads.