Sony’s latest financial results show the PS5 is keeping pace with the PS4 sales curve.
Sony has published its financial results for the first financial quarter of 2023 today, which show that the company has now shipped 41.7 million PS5s. That puts sales of the console almost on a par with the PS4 at the same point in its lifetime, according to the VGChartz tracker.
The number of PS5s sold in the quarter up to 30 June hit 3.3 million, which is up by 0.9 million from Q1 2022. Meanwhile, the total number of ‘full game software’ sold for PS4 and PS5 reached 56.5 million, compared with 47.2 million for Q1 2022. But sales of Sony’s first-party titles remained flat at 6.6 million.
Speaking of first-party titles, the results show that God of War Ragnorok has sold 11 million units on PS5 as of 22nd January 2023. The PS4 version of the game has sold 5.1 million copies as of 13th November 2022.
The total sales for Sony’s ‘Game & Network Services’ division rose to 771.9 billion yen, up 167.8 billion yen on the same quarter from last year. This division is now by far the biggest at Sony, underlining just how important gaming has become for its bottom line over the years: for example, the combined sales for Sony’s Music and Pictures divisions fall well short of the total for the gaming arm.
Sony raised its sales forecast for the Game & Network Services division to 4,170 billion yen for the financial year, up 7% on its previous forecast. The company cited an ‘increase in sales of non-first-party titles including add-on content’ and the ‘impact of foreign exchange rates’ as the reasons behind the upward revision.
One curious omission in Sony’s financial results was that the company didn’t provide numbers for PlayStation Plus subscribers for Q1 2023, even though the supplemental data gives the subscriber numbers for the previous four quarters:
- Q1 2022: 47.3 million
- Q2 2022: 45.4 million
- Q3 2022: 46.4 million
- Q4 2022: 47.4 million
Sony introduced the ‘Extra’ and ‘Premium’ tiers for PlayStation Plus in June 2022, which brought the service closer to Microsoft’s Game Pass offering. The figures seem to show a dip in subscriber numbers in Q2 2022, just after the new tiers were introduced, followed by an increase of around a million subscribers every quarter. It will be interesting to find out whether that upward trend has continued.
Read more: PlayStation 5 | Sony shipped 6.3 million consoles between January and March
