Sony’s quarterly report shows 17.3 million sales figure for PlayStation 5, still lagging behind PS4

Gaming has been in the news a lot lately, with big acquisitions rocking the boat left and right. However, headline-grabbing purchases don’t tell us much about the health of a company. To find that out, we need to dive into their financial data and the best time to do that is when they release their quarterly reports. With the release of Sony’s fourth-quarter data from last year, we can get a bit extra information about the real state of play.

There is a lot of data to slog through, much of it not relevant to gaming, but here are a few key takeaways from the quarterly report:

PS5 sales are still underperforming: Supply issues are still plaguing the PS5. This is particularly worrying when compared to the PS4’s sales at the same point in its life cycle. Despite selling in comparable numbers to the previous generation for the first year after its release, last quarter represented the first full holiday season for the PS5 and it sold 3.9 million units. This doesn’t compare well to the PS4, which sold 6.4 million units during the same period in 2014.Gaming under-performed for Sony last quarter: Sony’s Gaming and Network Services Segment did not meet revenue forecasts for the year. This is largely due to the lower than expected sales of the PS5 during the holiday season 2021, but that had a trickle-down effect on sales of first-party gaming titles as well.Despite all this, Sony made more money than expected: It is almost counter-intuitive, but the lower sales didn’t impact the profit Sony made off their hardware. In fact, operating profit was higher than forecast because the cost of producing the PS5 and running the PlayStation side of the company has fallen over the past year. So, while sales were not as high as the company Read more on gamepur.com