Switch Struggles to Keep Up With Older PS4

The five-year-old PlayStation 4 is delivering more energy, and profit growth, for Sony’s business, when compared with Nintendo’s much-newer Switch, according to Bloomberg.

Quarterly figures from the two video-gaming rivals showed that Sony is benefiting from its best-ever console cycle, while Nintendo is struggling to expand sales of its play-at-home-or-on-the-go machine. Sony boosted its operating profit forecast yet again, while Nintendo missed estimates and kept its outlook intact.

Game machines tend to follow a predictable cycle of accelerating growth, price cuts and retirement. But Sony is breaking that pattern with a strong collection of gaming titles for the holiday shopping season, including homegrown hit Spider-man, that’s setting up the PlayStation 4 for its best-year ever. Without a fresh crop of new gaming titles and only one planned for the holidays, Nintendo kept its forecast for 20 million Switch shipments unchanged for the fiscal year.

Investors have noticed: Sony shares had been up 15 percent this year prior to the results, while Nintendo is down. On Wednesday, after the earnings, Sony climbed as much as 7.1 percent, its biggest intraday jump in a year, while Nintendo fell as much as 4.7 percent. Essentially, Sony is taking a page out of Nintendo’s playbook, churning out games made by its own studio; those first-party titles are also more profitable.