Sony will release “major single-player games every year” starting in 2025

Another strong quarter for the Japanese company

Sony

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has released its earnings report for Q2 of the current fiscal year (FY 2024 for Sony), which includes strong results for the video games division.

Sales from game and network services were up ¥117.4 billion Yen (to ¥1,071.5b), resulting in a plus of ¥89.9b in operating income (to ¥138.8b) in comparison to the same quarter in the previous year.

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Sony’s Q2 of FY 2024 in brief:

• 3.8 million PS5 units sold (down 1.1 million compared to Q2 of FY 2023)
• Sales of first-party games slowed down due to fewer releases
• Sales of third-party games and addons increased

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Sony cited an increased revenue from PlayStation Plus and sales of third-party games as well as addons (this includes DLC and microtransactions like in-game currency and cosmetics) as contributors to the growth, while hardware sales continued to decrease. However, it mentioned an increase in the profitability of the sold hardware, which had a positive impact on the operating income.

Sony predicts that the increased hardware profitability and sales of third-party games will make for a strong remainder of 2024, correcting its financial forecasts upwards by 4% despite income from first-party games being predicted to decrease due to a lack of new releases.

3.8 million PS5 units were sold in the latest quarter, down 1.1 million units from the same period in the previous year. This makes for a total of 65.6 million shipped PS5 consoles thus far across the system’s lifetime. Lower hardware sales are entirely within Sony’s predictions from earlier in the year.

Not surprising is the continued growth of the digital-to-physical sales ratio for games: 70% of all sales were digital in the recent quarter, up by 3% compared to the same window last year.

Since first-party game sales slowed down overall, there are no new sales milestones to report aside from Astro Bot, Sony’s latest first-party release, surpassing 1.5 million sold copies – the platformer seems to be quite a success.

Chairman Hiroki Totoki commented that Sony plans on “releasing major single-player game titles every year from next fiscal year onwards” (via Gematsu). For Sony, this will begin on April 1, 2025.

Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Tsushima follow-up Ghost of Yotei are currently known to arrive on PS5 at some point in 2025 and are poised to bring back some momentum to first-party game sales.