At the same time that Sony continues to spit out positive numbers regarding their console sales, it seems to be going all the harder when it comes to software. Bloomberg recently published an article that reviewed Sony’s latest performance, and according to it, the Playstation division seems to be the part of the company that is struggling a bit at the moment. It is reported, among other things, that although it has started to be able to produce and ship more and more Playstation 5 consoles, it has not been able to develop this into higher sales when it comes to games and subscriptions. It certainly doesn’t seem to be a massive difference from before, but compared to the same quarter last year, game sales for Sony’s titles have dropped from 70.5 to 68 million units. The number of active Playstation players also fell during the same period from 112 million to 108, and even if the number of Playstation Plus subscribers increased, it was extremely marginal as there are now 47.4 million paying customers in that category.
This is how analyst Hideki Yasuda described the situation:
“Sales of the hardware are increasing on par with Sony’s plan, but the momentum of software, the lucrative part of the game business, remains weak. This shows PlayStation users are not buying new games,”
Sony themselves, through Hiroki Totoki, explained that the decline is due to an uncertain market, and they also said that they are keeping an eye on the economic situation around the world:
“We expect a clear slowdown in the European economy and feel strong uncertainty on the Chinese economy. We’re not optimistic about the outlook and remain vigilant especially on the US market, which has the largest impact to our business.”
It is also worth pointing out that Sony has not had any major games in recent months (which of course affects the sales figures), but it is also noteworthy that the launch of PSVR2 does not seem to have made it possible to release more titles.
