PlayStation 5 could hit 100 million this year, with Black Friday and other end-of-year sales on the way.
Sony released its latest quarterly numbers on Thursday (the 5th), and the result tells a curious story: even while selling fewer PlayStation 5 consoles, the company made almost double the profit from its games division. How is that possible? The answer is simple: people are spending more inside the game console than on buying the device itself.
Between July and September, Sony shipped 2.6 million PS5s to stores, against 4 million in the same period last year.
But, surprisingly, profit in the games division shot up 83%, going from ¥120 billion to ¥220 billion (about US$1.4 billion).
The treasure map is in the PlayStation ecosystem.
When a player buys a digital game, pays the PlayStation Plus subscription or buys items inside games (such as outfits, season passes and expansions), Sony’s profit margin is far higher than on hardware sales. And those were exactly the areas that saw the strongest growth in the quarter:
- Games downloaded over the internet: up about 23% from the previous year
- PS Plus subscriptions and ads: growth of close to 20%
- Total sales of full games: rose to 88.2 million units (up from 80.3 million)
Marvel’s Wolverine launched on September 15 exclusively for PS5, and Marvel’s new game starring the grumpy hero helped boost these numbers.
By early November, the title had already sold more than 2.4 million copies, pushing up first-party software sales, which jumped from 6.3 million to 8.2 million units.
Sony took advantage of the moment and raised the games division’s annual profit target by ¥40 billion, to ¥700 billion, betting that online services and games from other publishers will stay strong.
Source: Sony
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