Commercial Console Lifespans – Tuesday Taffee (Wednesday Waffle?)

Console lifespans – they are getting shorter again? A good thing? I doubt it. Touched on this before but this is close to my heart so I just had to talk about it again.

The original consoles didn’t last very long. The pong clones only lasted a few months, years but there was no long term support for these systems. The 8bit consoles also didn’t last that long, about 5 years seems to be the norm. Things changed when
Sony introduced the original Sony Playstation which lasted for 10 years and repeated that feat with the Playstation 2.

It seems that Sony had set a new norm for console lifetimes being 10 years – the Dreamcast and original Xbox are sad exeptions to that rule. We had to wait for quite a few months for both the Playstation and later the Playstation 2 to become available in stores in Europe. Had to wait long times for movies to appear in theatres over here. That changed in the naughties. The Xbox360 was actually world premiered in the Netherlands – it put current gen gaming right back on the map – and people flocked to it. It also lasted a long time and in fact might still be going strong to some extend.

With the introduction of the XBoxOne and PS4 all went back to the things of yesteryear for us in Europe. The systems were not readily available in all territories with only a select couple of countries finally getting access to the consoles long after Japan and the US could get their hands on the systems. In fact it boiled down to a 1.5 year wait in my neck of the woods – the Netherlands – for both systems to become readily available in the shops.

Now with the new hardware iterations the current gen systems seem to have gone back to the 5 year life span of yesteryear. This might be okay for consumers having instant access to the hardware but in
territories who have to wait for 1.5 years the commercial life span of a system is already 30% gone when they finally get released. Same will be true for the Scorpion and PS4 Pro.

I reckon this type of behaviour will push a certain type of gamer away from console gaming and perhaps more will pick up PC gaming instead….I am currently still playing both – oh dearie me… 😉