PlayStation sees holiday sales reach over $9 billion

The financial report for Sony’s past quarter sales has just been published and showcased an impressive year for the company, with a rise in both PlayStation and overall company sales. However, with a successful 2023 now behind them, Sony is forecasting a decline in hardware sales for 2024.

Sony has given a few reasons for this and has already lowered its sales predictions for the year accordingly. With the PlayStation 5 now expected to have steady levels of stock available and sales this past holiday season being so high, it is only natural that sales of the console will now diminish, at least for the time being.

However, perhaps the main reason why Sony has adjusted its financial projection for the year is that it was revealed that no major franchises are expected to launch any new titles for the PS5 until around April 2025. This confirms the speculation that in the case of PS5 exclusives anyway, 2024 could be a slow year for gaming.

As far as Sony’s numbers for 2023 were concerned, they break down as follows: PlayStation sales were up 20% reaching ¥9.54 trillion ($63.3 billion) while operating income was down by 15% to ¥979.4 billion ($6.5 billion).

Overall company sales for Sony also increased this past year by 23% to ¥3.2 trillion ($21.2 billion), while its overall operating income dropped by around 12% to ¥184.2 billion ($1.2 billion).

In this past holiday sales quarter, Sony sold a staggering 8.2 million PlayStation 5 consoles, which is over a million more than they did in the same period of 2022 when they sold just over 7.1 million units. Total sales for the PS5 topped over 22.7 million consoles in 2023.

During this same sales period, almost 90 million PlayStation games were purchased worldwide. This figure is almost 5 million more than the 86.5 million total that were sold the year before. This past quarter only saw one first-party exclusive release for the PlayStation 5, which was Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Sales of the game were perhaps aided by this lack of competition, with more than 10 million copies sold in less than 110 days of it being released on the market. To emphasize this impressive sales feat, the previous Spider-Man game only sold around 13.2 million after almost a whole year, while sales for Miles Morales only reached 6.5 million after around 250 days of release.

The PlayStation Network also saw a significant increase in active monthly users, with 123 million members now being recorded compared to the 112 million in 2022. With that said though, and as mentioned already, it looks as though PlayStation users will now have to wait until 2025 – at the earliest – for the next ‘big’ Sony exclusive title.

With no new upcoming titles and the PS5 now also entering the latter of the ‘standard’ console cycle, Sony has officially released its lowered financial forecasts for 2024. Predicted Game & Network Services sales are now decreased by 6% from ¥4.4 trillion ($29.2 billion) to ¥4.15 trillion ($27.5 billion).

Overall, Sony enjoyed a successful 2023 and a particularly strong holiday season, with total Game & Network Sales up over 15% to ¥1.44 trillion ($9.6 billion). Both add-on content and digital game sales also increased more than 20% to ¥632 billion ($4.2 billion). Sales of hardware devices also rose by around 13.5% this past year to ¥659.7 billion ($4.4 billion).