The hold-outs: Why some gamers haven’t upgraded to the PS5 (or Xbox Series)

It's not just a matter of games or money this time around.

A PS5. Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment

More than 50 million active PlayStation users are merrily playing on Sony’s last-gen PS4 console and have yet to upgrade to the PS5, Sony’s president said last week.

And why haven’t they done so?

Over the past week, I’ve heard from more than 300 gamers about why they—or people they’re close to—have stuck with the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One in a world where so much attention is now on the PS5 and Xbox Series.

For these gamers, the so-called eighth generation of hardware, the one that began back in 2013, is just fine. No need for 2020’s ninth gen, even past the apparent halfway point.

You can safely guess some of the hold-outs; reasons. They would be typical in any console transition: lack of next-gen games catching their eye, lack of money to pay for a new box when the old one still works (pretty) well.

Other reasons are unique to this generation—the pandemic, changing platform policies, stubborn pricing, and the slow pace of releases. These don’t all seem like one-time issues (though here’s hoping we don’t have another pandemic for a century or so). They hint at how players may view future console shifts, too

And then there were the outlier responses, like the people who told me they’re just waiting for the PlayStation 6.

Ask people a question like this, and you get a lot of interesting answers.