Sony has achieved significant success, selling more than 61 million PlayStation 5 consoles, but the company has faced a 32% decline in hardware sales compared to last year.
In its latest financial report, Sony revealed the details of PlayStation 5 console sales. During the last quarter, the company sold 2.4 million devices. This is significantly less than 3.3 million in the same period of 2023 and 4.5 million in the previous quarter.
Despite the drop in hardware sales, Sony recorded a 12% year-on-year increase in total revenue from the gaming segment. This led to a 33% increase in profit.
The company attributes this success to two key factors. First, software revenue grew by 18%. Second, revenue from network services, mainly PlayStation Plus, increased by 25%.
Sony does not disclose the exact number of PlayStation Plus subscribers. Instead, the company reports the monthly number of active PlayStation Network users. Now this figure is 116 million, which is 8 million more than last year. However, this is slightly less than the 118 million users in the previous quarter.
Interestingly, the number of games sold actually decreased by 5% compared to last year. The growth in revenues and profits can be attributed to higher game prices.
In the reporting quarter, Sony released a PS5 exclusive — game Stellar Blade. According to the developer ShiftUp, one million copies of the game were sold by the end of June.
Compared to its competitors, Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles during the same period. Although Sony sells more PS5 units, the Switch is not too far behind, given that, that this is the seventh year of the console’s production.
Source: Eurogamer