While Sony and Xbox have spoken this week about the lifespan of the previous generation of consoles, here are some graphs showing the longevity of the old machines.
Recently, Microsoft claimed to have already stopped production of all its Xbox One models at the end of 2020, in response to Sony’s announcement to extend the life of its PS4s until the end of 2022. Is this normal longevity for a console generation? What is the average lifespan of Xbox and PlayStation machines?
To find out, a few years ago, the site GameTrip has compiled data from every console or video game machine released between 1970 and the modern era, in order to establish a comprehensive chart of video game history. Thanks to these statistics, we were able to establish some graphs showing the longevity of the different consoles and an average for current generations.
- The console that has lived the longest: Nintendo Famicom, 20 years (1983-2003), the NES version having been discontinued earlier, in 1995.
- The console died prematurely: far too many, but we can cite the Nintendo Virtual Boy, the Apple Pippin, the Casio PV-1000 or the Amstrad GX-4000, all of which hardly exceed 12 months of production.
- Average lifespan of consoles: according to known data consoles, whose production has been discontinued, the average is 5.6 years, based on 155 home consoles, laptops, and gaming computers
- Generation 7 lifespan (taking into account only market leaders): 8.5 years.
- Generation 8 lifespan (considering only market leaders): 7.5 years (but the PS4 is still in business, 9 years, as is the Switch, 5 years).
- Lifespan of PlayStation consoles: 11 years (to date, PS4 still in operation).
- Lifespan of Nintendo consoles: 8.8 years (to date, Switch still in operation).
- Lifespan of Xbox consoles: 8.7 years
- Lifetime of Atari consoles/PCs: 5.4 years
- Lifespan of SEGA consoles: 5.3 years
- Lifespan of NEC consoles: 4 years
