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Sony has announced that it’s lowering its 2023 fiscal year sales forecast for the PlayStation 5, and it now thinks that it will only sell around 21 million units of the console. This is about 4 million less than Sony was predicting it would sell. Back in November of 2023, Sony President Hiroki Totoki said the company was predicting it would sell 25 million units by the end of the 2023 fiscal year ending on March 30, 2024.
Totoki noted this would be a challenging sales target. But the hope was that the release of the new PlayStation 5 model with the removable disc drive and holiday buying would drive sales up enough to meet the goal. Things are a little different now that the end of the fiscal year is just a month and a half away. Sony posted its Fiscal Year 2023 third quarter consolidated financial results on February 14, and the report details all areas of Sony’s business. Including games. The company says it posted record revenue in the Gaming & Network Services segment with an increase of 16% compared to the same time last year.
An increase in sales of first-party titles played a hand in this revenue bump. As did sales of the PlayStation 5. Still, Sony didn’t sell as many PlayStation 5 consoles this past holiday season as it did the previous year. According to the report, it only sold about 8.2 million units during that period.
PlayStation 5 sales for the 2023 fiscal year have reached 16.4 million
Sony’s PlayStation 5 sales have been pretty strong throughout the console’s lifecycle. Thanks in no small part to both first-party exclusives and the general popularity of the PlayStation brand. However, the company has reached a bit of a slowdown in this area of late. So far for the fiscal year 2023, it’s only sold about 16.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles, down from the 19.1 million that it sold in the fiscal year 2022.
Even with these figures, Sony will still end up on a positive note when it comes to PlayStation 5 sales for the year. Even though it won’t reach its previously predicted target of 25 million, it should still outpace the sales from the previous fiscal year by almost 2 million. What will be interesting to see is if Sony can exceed its previous year’s sales again at the end of the fiscal year 2024. Sony has said that it won’t have any new major existing franchise titles released within the next fiscal year. It’s targeting March 2025 or later for big games like this.
This could impact its PlayStation 5 sales for the fiscal year 2024 as first-party titles have been a big sales driver for the console. On the other hand, this will potentially leave room for the success of brand-new first-party franchises. There’s more than a year between now and the end of the fiscal year 2024. So that’s lots of room for some successful new games.
Sony say they won't have any new major existing franchise titles like God of War or Spider-Man, releasing in the next fiscal year (until March 2025) #PlayStation pic.twitter.com/v9nHjg2Z9D
— Genki✨ (@Genki_JPN) February 14, 2024
Increasing margins through multiplatform games
Even if Sony misses its sales target for the PlayStation 5 for this fiscal year, it has plenty of potential to make up for that in the year ahead. Sony President Hiroki Totoki also wants to increase margins through more multiplatform first-party games. This could be an area where it’s able to increase revenue even in the event of lower console sales numbers.
Totoki doesn’t;t mention any games specifically. Just that he believes multiplatform releases could be a good way for Sony to increase revenue and profits.