Today, during Sony’s quarterly conference call for investors and analysts, Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki spoke about the state of affairs in the PlayStation business.
Total game time spent by PlayStation users from June to September increased slightly quarter-on-quarter, but was down 10% year-over-year, mainly due to increased opportunities to go outside.
Sales of past games have dropped sharply, while sales of new games have remained strong. It appears that users are playing fewer games to save money.
Totoki also attributed the decline in PlayStation Plus users, noting that it was due to a larger decline in PS4 user engagement than expected. On the other hand, PS5 user activity remains significantly higher compared to PS4. In this regard, Sony is making even more efforts to increase the penetration of PS5 equipment in order to offset the overall loss in user engagement in the future.
Material and logistics restrictions affecting the production of PS5 hardware have “significantly eased” and Sony managed to produce 6.5 million units during the quarter, faster than planned.
Demand from customers continues to be strong, and it took an average of 17.5 hours in September to sell 100,000 devices after they arrived at retail stores in the US.
Later in the conversation, Totoki noted that Sony hadn’t noticed a drop in demand due to PS5 price hikes in some regions.
To meet such strong demand, Sony plans to do its best to increase shipments this year and the holiday season and intends to exceed its previously announced full year forecast of 18 million units (bringing the total to 37.3 million units by March 2023) .
Totoki also reiterated that the goal for the next fiscal year is to surpass 23 million units, ahead of PS4.
Sony expects God of War Ragnarok to perform similarly to the previous game, which has sold 23 million units to date.
We also learned that Bungie’s collaboration with PlayStation Studios is going well.
Totoki also added that sales of the PC version of Marvel’s Spider-Man “neared the highest level ever” for a PC game released by Sony.
Sony is implementing various initiatives to increase user engagement and accelerate the growth of the gaming business, both in terms of hardware and software. The Company expects the results of these efforts to be reflected in sales and earnings from the second half of the fiscal year (October 2022 to March 2023) and into the next fiscal year.
