Sony Interactive Entertainment has just shared some interesting stats regarding where things currently stack up for it console-wise, and they make for pretty interesting reading. The PS5 has been acknowledged by the platform holder as reprsenting its “most profitable generation to date”, but PS4 continues to play a big role in its overall business.
Yup, while we learned last month that overall Playstation hardware sales hadn’t hit Sony’s lofty goals over the last fiscal year – pretty much in line with what seems to be the trend across the industry at the moment – that doesn’t mean there aren’t still things to be boasted about in corporate presentations.
As part of one such presentation at a Business Segment Meeting, Sony said that the “PS5 generation” has generated $106 billion in sales over four years, nearly surpassing the $107 billion total cited for the PS4 generation that ran from 2013 to 2019. Though, it was noted that as of April this year, both the PS5 and PS4 had 49 million active users, with those two totals each making up about half of the publisher’s overall console user base.
“As you can see, the PlayStation 5 userbase has continued to grow significantly, driving to half of our monthly active consoles,” Hideaki Nishino, one of the two men set to fill part of retired CEO Jim Ryan’s role in a matter of days, said during a call (thanks, VGC). “While the PlayStation 4 is still an important part of our business, our PlayStation 5 players are even more engaged than in our previous generation, and we expect these trends to continue.”
In line with that, Sony also cited the PS5 as having contributed 2.4 billion total gameplay hours during the period ending April 30, while the PS4 sat at 1.4 billion. PS5 users are also blowing more cash on add-ons for games, services, and peripherals, as you might expect.
Meanwhile, while Sony is now bringing a lot of its games to PC as well as its consoles, its plan is to keep on releasing its “tentpole” single-player titles – the likes of God of War Ragnarok and Ghost of Tsushima – on console first in order to encourage folks to get into playing the series on PlayStation. Live service stuff, however, will keep on coming to both PC and console day one, since that makes the most business sense.
Make sure you stay tuned to VG247 if you want to hear about the big announcements from the PlayStation State of Play that’s set to take place later today, May 30.