Sony won’t release “any new major existing franchise titles” before April 2025

thesixthaxis.com:

Sony’s latest financial report saw the company revising expected PlayStation 5 sales downward for the coming year, with Sony Group President Hiroki Totoki saying that they “do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year.”

That means there’s no big blockbusting sequels on the level of God of War Ragnarok or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to push the PS5’s sales forward, but Sony still has a busy lineup of new IP and third party relations that they will be relying on through the coming year. For example, there’s the new IP of Concord, which has yet to be fully revealed, the remake of Until Dawn, Stellar Blade and the expected release of third party games like Silent Hill 2.

Because of this they expect profits from first party games to decrease in the next fiscal year, and they also expect PS5 sales to start to slow down in the coming year – the PS5 will be entering its fifth year this autumn, which is kind of mind-boggling, isn’t it?

To that point, sales for the current year are also falling short of the target. Sony had previously set the ambitious target of 25 million PS5 sales for the year ending in March 2024, but despite heavy discounting through the run up to Christmas where it sold 8.2 million consoles, the total for the year so far is 16.4 million and Sony now expects to only reach 21 million consoles sold. That’s still a huge number of consoles sold, but Sony might have overestimated demand coming out of the years long supply shortages.

With Jim Ryan stepping down as Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO at the end of March, Totoki-san will take over on an interim basis, and has used the last few months as SIE Chairman to visit studios and gain a greater understanding of the console business.

While he has praised the group’s creativity and motivation to make great games, he’s also felt that SIE as a whole can do better as a business.

Totoki-san said, “I’ve had meetings with the leaders there—the studios. People who work in the studios have very