Sony’s recent Q3 fiscal earnings snapshot suggests that the hardware manufacturer sold north of seven million PlayStation 5 units over the holiday season. Should this trend continue, the company may meet its ambitious goal of selling a total of 18 million units by the end of the 2022 fiscal year. Supply chain issues beleaguered the gaming industry as a whole during the system's launch, but, with these problems apparently solved, Sony can one once again focus on dominating the console gaming market.
The video game industry grew massively in 2020 due in part to the lockdowns and stay-at-home initiatives that defined most of the year. However, Sony doesn’t appear to be experiencing any sort of slump now that these restrictions have by and large been relaxed or repealed entirely in most areas. In fact, Sony’s Game and Network Services division took in just under ten billion USD in 2022, a year-on-year improvement of fifty-three percent.
Additionally, the more than seven million PlayStation 5 units sold by Sony over the holiday season represented an eighty-two percent increase over the previous quarter. Sony is estimated to have sold just over thirty-two million PS5 units since the console launched back in late 2020, meaning that more than 25 percent of lifetime PlayStation 5 sales have come in Sony’s most recent fiscal quarter. That said, while Sony has until the end of March to meet its estimated sales expectations, the company will have to shift roughly five million PS5 units in that time.
While this isn’t impossible, it doesn’t seem particularly likely. Big-budget releases tend to be fairly few-and-far-between early on in the year, and consumers are less likely to splurge on big-ticket items like video game consoles in the wake of the holiday season. Plus, Sony bet heavily on Square Enix’s review-bombed Forspoken, a title that probably won’t encourage many console players to pick up a new PS5 system.
Be that as it may, Sony’s Q3 financial results are nonetheless impressive and should be encouraging for fans of the brand. Some of this success was likely driven by the release of God of War Ragnarok which set the record for the fastest-selling first-party launch in PlayStation history, and, of course, much of it was driven by the advent of the holiday season. Regardless, Sony seems to be on the right track at the moment, and that should be taken as an encouraging sign for gamers everywhere.
Source: Engadget