PlayStation Data Suggests $70 Games Are Resulting In Fewer Sales

thegamer.com:

The Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 heralded the new generation and while it can still sometimes feel like a relatively new era, the fact is it's been almost three years already, while we're still getting used to some new standards. Such new standards include the pricing for this gen's games, which have increased. Nowdays many new games, especially triple-A ones, launch at a price of $70 or £70 minus a cent or penny, respectively.

But according to some data, this $69.99 price point could be negatively impacting game unit sales. The data comes from Sony and therefore applies to the PS5's game unit sales more specifically, but it's revealing how the shift in price could be affecting consumer behaviour this gen. In a deep dive, Tweaktown observed that while Sony is generating record-breaking revenues from PS4 and PS5 console sales, and that software revenues were equally at an all-time high, actual game unit sales had dropped substantially.

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Pulling from data provided by Sony, the graphs show that PlayStation users spent $6.367 billion in combined digital and physical software purchases for fiscal year 2022. However, overall game unit sales dropped to 264.2 million games sold for FY22, representing a 39 million drop in unit sales from a year ago. However, Sony has not only managed to maintain revenue from software sales but is making record amounts. So what does this suggest?

As TweakTown noted, it suggests that PlayStation gamers are buying fewer games but spending more money on the games that they do buy, and that this is emblematic of the higher $70 price tag for new PlayStation 5 titles. Another data point also seemed to back this up, with Sony management confirming in a results briefing