PS is the only platform with all time high record numbers and in a multi year growing trend on:
- Console active userbase
- Console game revenue
- AAA multi game subs revenue
- Gaming accesories revenue
- Movie/tv show adaptations revenue
SIE also became in a few years one of the top grossing PC publishers with a huge multi year growth, soon will be in a position of being able to open their own PSN PC store including there 3rd parties too and maybe becoming the first serious competitor for Steam in PC.
SIE's growth reached a point that depending on the quarter or year they are the top grossing gaming company of the year, passing Tentcent gaming revenue. If they continue that growth soon SIE will be consistently the top 1 every year and quarter.
To be fair, that 132M users from Steam is data from 2021.
Back in 2021 the CCU peak was 27M, today it peaked at almost 38M, same goes for the in-game players peak, from 7,8M in 2021 to 12,5M this months.
That's a near 40% growth in CCU and a 60% growth in ingame players. If you add a 40% to that 132M number it'd be over 180M monthly users, a 60% would be over 200M already.
Not sure about Roblox' growth numbers yearly, i assume they are very big too, as for PS ones they are quite stagnant since 2020, last number was 116M , down from 123M in December as you said.
Console MAU fluctuate each quarter, being the Christmas one the highest one.
PS MAU kept growing and are at the all time record for a console brand, achieving 123M the most recent Christmas quarter. Around 50% of the PS userbase are still on PS4 and around half of the PS5 users are new to PS.
I agree on A, but how are traditional games market not growing exactly?
The total gaming market revenue (this is including mobile, PC, console and arcade) kept growing during 50 years until the covid peak of 2021.
In 2022 and 2023 remained flat, so investors and publishers are worried that it could have peaked. That, combined with the fact that every generation the AAA games get more expensive, the huge inflation and economical crisis and economical uncertainity (apparently there's a more than likely upcoiming economical collapse of multiple main western economies) in the west to make made them more conservative trying to reduce costs to increase their profitability, plus to focus more on less games that they consider are more likely to be successful. Some investors moved away to other markets with higher growth like IA.
That's the reason of many "recent" layoffs, studio closures and game cancellations.
Microsoft has essentially no IP of value outside of ABK and Zenimax,
ABK and Zenimax have very powerful stuff like CoD, Candy Crash, Diablo, Warcraft and Doom, plus potential in some -right now almost empty shells of former glory not at their highest level- Starcraft, Overwatch, Elder Scrolls or Fallout, which could be resurrected to bring them back to their former glory.
Outside them MS has Minecraft, Forza Horizon (in great shape but their whole team of leads left) and Flight Simulator, plus former glories/empty shells that could be resurrected like Halo, Gears, Forza, Fable, Crash, Spyro/Skylanders who could be also reworked and brought back to their former glory.
So they several several key IPs at a top level (CoD, Candy Crash and Minecraft at the top one) plus many other dormant/former glory IPs with potential to be resurrected and be super successful again even if the current state/performance of their team makes it look very difficult to achieve.
MS may be short of exclusives, but their multiplatform approach and huge amount of top IPs make them the most powerful publisher (different than platform holder) and show a big potential for their future as publisher which seems at the same difficult due to the state of many of their key IPs and teams and the lack of very successful new IPs in the recent generations.
But as platform holder, they are moving away their focus on their console abandoning and killing it, to focus instead on becoming a multiplatform publisher giving less atention to their platform holder side with the idea of turning their platform into a multiplatform store/platform with presence in console, PC and mobile.
