Sony has put out its latest financial report and its good news for the PlayStation which generated a whopping $96 million in revenue across the Holiday quarter. However the company has also cut its sales forecast for the rest of the financial year.
One of the reasons for that cut is that Sony won’t be launching any sequels or follow-ups for its major franchises for a while.
“Regarding first-party software, we aim to continue to focus on producing high-quality productions and producing live service games,” Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said during the earnings call. “But while major projects are currently under development, we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year like God of War: Ragnarok and Marvel Spider-Man 2.”
For clarity’s sake, the next fiscal year runs from April 2024 to March 2025.
The wording is very important as it still allows for new IP coming to PlayStation such as Concorde and Stellar Blade. There’s also still a slim possibility of sequels from franchise’s Sony doesn’t consider as “major.”
While the PlayStation 5 sold very well over the holiday period, managing 8.2m units and thus bringing the fiscal year’s total to 16.4m, Sony has backed down from its ambitious plan to sell 25m consoles in this fiscal year and is now expecting 21 million units to be sold. Sony also stated that the PlayStation 5 has reached 54.7m sales in total. That means the PlayStation 5 sits as the 14th best-selling console of all time based on the Wikipedia list, but it should overtake the Xbox One quite soon for the 13th spot.
Everything else is going well for Sony. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has surpassed 10m copies sold through which brings the franchise up to 50m sales in total.
Meanwhile, the monthly active users for PSN rose from 112m to 123m. If we account for the total PlayStation 5 sales, that means there’s still 66m users popping on to PSN from other devices, most of which are probably PlayStation 4s.
While it’s disappointing to hear that no major franchise entries will be getting released until at least March 2025, it’s not actually that surprising. Hopefully we might get to see some new IP launched in that period instead, especially since we know several studios are working on exactly that.
PlayStation as a brand is continuing to dominate Xbox, which is why tomorrow’s special podcast is going to be fascinating as we see how Microsoft is planning on switching up its strategy.