What is the average age of ps3 owner

Remaining sales will focus on the 4GB Xbox E, aimed at budget shoppers and casual gamers looking for a dirt-cheap system with lots of affordable games. Sony, which has officially pledged to "support" the PS3 into , will show few signs of discontinuing the console or its access to PSN. In this game of PR chicken with Microsoft, Sony is sure to blink last.

Its global audience and continued strong PS3 sales will allow it to keep its network support running for quite a while longer than Xbox Live for the Unlike the Xbox, PlayStations have a proven track record of longevity even after their technical obsolescence.

Sony sold 28 million units of the PSone, a minimalist version of the first PlayStation that was available for four years after the PS2 debuted.

Similarly, more than 50 million PS2s were sold after the PS3 came along. With the flow of new games on older consoles slowing to a few last drops, most avid gamers will be facing the question that arises once or twice a decade: Should you keep that old console?

The first question you should really ask yourself is how well your console is working. If your machine's got a shoddy disc tray or other reliability issues, just get rid of it any way you can. By comparison, the Xbox had a failure rate of around 50 percent its first two years of production and only recently caught up to the PS3 in terms of reliability.

But if you've got a good working PlayStation 3 or Xbox , you might want to hang on to it. Collectors generally recommend you dedicate your limited storage space to games rather than hardware. Keep what you enjoyed playing and get rid of the games you didn't," Brun says. If you do have them on display, make sure they're not in a place where direct sunlight can hit them, because it will discolor them.

If you're not interested in storing your old machine and games, and selling them sounds like too much trouble for too little reward, you might want to consider donating them to a nonprofit like The Get-Well Gamers Foundation, which finds a new home for old consoles at children's hospitals across the country.

While the vast majority of Xbox game releases will be destined for the Xbox One at this point, a few final Xbox titles will be rolling off the line as well. And they'll probably all be sports games. Around , the last Xbox games on disc, at least will similarly make their unheralded appearance, and within a year or so, sales of the console will be officially discontinued. If you've decided to hang on to your old console or want to work on building a serious game collection, now's the time to go bargain hunting.

Games from the consoles' peak years will be a steal. This is a good time to buy games, because they are still readily available and cheap. Speaking of plummeting prices and towering piles of unwanted games, is very likely the year that GameStop will announce a dramatic restructuring of its business model, essentially ending the brick-and-mortar game retailer concept that began as Babbage's in While the demise of GameStop, slated to close hundreds of locations in , has been predicted for years as digital downloads and mobile gaming gained in popularity, the launch of a new console generation will help the retailer post reasonably strong earnings in and into The chain's core revenue streams, which remained consistent from , have been from new games 40 percent of net sales , used games 27 percent and new hardware 15 percent.

New consoles will mean strong sales in each of these three areas, and GameStop investors will hope for a profit boom like the one seen in as the current-gen consoles hit their prime. By , it will become clear that strong next-gen sales are masking deep, inevitable shifts that have been eroding GameStop's core business. Hardware sales will remain brisk, but owners of newer consoles will be buying games digitally with increasing frequency.

As fewer new releases are bought on disc, fewer will hit the market used, robbing GameStop of its highly profitable "used new game" selection. The resale value of remaining titles for , PS3 and Wii will be in free fall, leaving GameStop with high amounts of inventory and low profit margins. The online store, already a financial bright spot for the chain in , will continue to offer downloadable PC games in competition with Steam , but it could also become an e-commerce hub for buying and selling used games in competition with Amazon's Trade-In Store.

Sony's consoles have a proven track record of spawning new games long after newer hardware has hit the market. The last original PlayStation games were published in , four years after the launch of the PlayStation 2.

Splitting the difference, we can guess the last PlayStation 3 games will land five or six years after the PS4 launch in And that they'll probably involve soccer or JRPGs. Around this time, sales of the PS3 will finally be discontinued.

Microsoft will announce that it is discontinuing support of Xbox Live for the , a decision that won't sit well with gamers still using the service for classic multiplayer titles like the Call of Duty, Halo and Forza franchises.

As in , when Xbox Live support was discontinued for the original Xbox five years after its successor's launch, Microsoft will give fans an early warning about the service's demise. Auto-renewals for only users will be canceled, and Microsoft will also offer some generous perks for Xbox One ownership to those still using a Just as in , we'll likely see protests from a vocal minority of gamers who want to continue milking their enjoyment out of the With the retirement of the first console's Xbox Live, a group of avid Halo 2 fans refused to exit the game, holding up the network's shutdown for nearly a month.

Similar holdouts are to be expected whenever the 's Xbox Live service is terminated, but this time Microsoft will be better prepared to hit the kill switch on the date of its own choosing. Sony will likely discontinue PlayStation Network support for the PlayStation 3, ending the brand's year inaugural experiment with fully networked gaming. By this point, the PS4 itself will be a lion in winter, having celebrated its seventh birthday.

The "ninth generation" of gaming consoles will officially be upon us, ushered in over several years by new replacements for the Xbox One, PS4 and Wii U, along with some new challenger devices. As for those old standbys, the , PS3 and Wii, they'll have drifted almost completely into cultural retirement.

The average price of games for the , PS3 and Wii will have hit rock bottom, where the games will stay for nearly a decade before starting to regain value. In his analysis of three decades of video game price data, JJ Hendricks describes this period years after a game's debut as a time of stabilization:. Another console generation, or two, has come after the game was released and no retail stores carry the games or consoles anymore.

Even used game shops like GameStop have stopped selling these titles. The best example of a console that's in a similar state in would probably be the Nintendo 64, which hasn't quite achieved the retro popularity of its predecessor, the Super NES, or the ready playability of its successor, the GameCube. Many a Wii, and PS3 will be unearthed from basements or storage units as the consoles enter a lifecycle phase Hendricks calls "the pre-collectible" period.

These are the years of blooming nostalgia, when young professionals who grew up with this generation of machines decide to relive their youth a bit. The price of games finally will start to tick back up as demand increases mildly. For some, what starts as a casual replaying of old games will begin to grow into a serious game collection, one that will for the first time since the games were published actually gain value in the years ahead.

One downside for these old console owners, though, will be finding a way to physically connect them to modern screens. While these kinds of technical limitations will make it a bit more challenging to get that old console up and running quickly, some veteran collectors say the real joy isn't in physically playing the old machines, but rather in sorting through the piles of games found stored away with the hardware and thinking back to the days when these games were new.

This is often what motivates relatively casual gamers to start collecting classic titles from their childhood, says Brun. I like to have the cartridge, but if I'm feeling nostalgic about the gameplay itself, I usually just fire up the emulator.

Three decades after stepping aside for a new generation of consoles, the Xbox , PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii are officially vintage. They have passed through their lengthy era of technical and cultural obsolescence and re-emerged onto the global stage as collectibles. It takes most consoles 25 years or more to reach this point, says Hendricks. And then, finally, their games begin to increase in value.

After 25 years many games have been destroyed. Brand new games sell for many times more than the game itself because collectors are willing to pay a bunch of money for them and they are harder to find in sealed condition. But some collectors worry that the games of will never reach the values of today's highly collectible NES and Atari games, which were rarely kept in pristine condition.

With each of these console's production runs in the tens of millions of units and many would-be profiteers hanging on to today's sealed games, Brun says there might simply never be a day when the , PS3 and Wii consoles and games are worth as much as their predecessors. And so, like Ebenezer Scrooge staring at his own neglected grave, we abruptly return to the present on a bit of a down note and find ourselves right back where we began: wondering what to do with our current-gen consoles and games.

A rational consensus for the long term would be to keep your favorite games and the rarest titles you've stumbled across, just in case they end up being worth a decent amount. Games won't take up much storage space, and if nothing else, you'll probably enjoy the nostalgia of fishing them out of a box in a few decades. As for the console itself, once you're done playing it regularly, you should probably sell it as early as possible while it still has decent value.

So the PS3 Slim launched yesterday - did you get one? I'm planning to take a look at one later this week but anecdotal reports from friends suggest that the Slim, "looks better under the telly" than the original. Deeper analysis to come. Yesterday also saw the release of the latest PS3 firmware.

Like all big console updates - and this is a fairly big one, at least cosmetically - it will take a while to get used to. To me it feels more cluttered than before. Less minimalistic, more shiny. The PSN Store gets far more prominence too and points at that download future we all know is coming. Any PS3 users here downoaded yet? If so what do you think? Want more PS3 news? Oh go on then.