On Thursday, Sony disclosed a 29% Year-over-Year decline in operating profit for the fiscal second quarter ending on September 30. Sony posted a profit of ¥263 billion Yen ($1.74 billion USD), with underwhelming performance noted from their image sensor and chip divisions.
In the fiscal second quarter, Sony reported quarterly revenues of ¥2.8 trillion ($18.5 billion), indicating an 8% rise from the values recorded in 2022. However, chip profits experienced a 37% decline allegedly due to “increased expenses” with a decline in sales for imaging sensors.
The Entertainment, Technology, and Services segment also saw a 9% year-on-year decrease.
“The North American market shows a significant year-on-year decline and at this point there’s no change to our view that a recovery in the market will take place from next fiscal year,” Sony President Hiroki Totoki proclaimed in a briefing.
The segment known as Sony’s Entertainment, Technology, and Services division typically covers a range of areas within Sony’s business, including entertainment content, technology products, and various services.
This comprehensive segment includes, consumer electronics such as televisions, mobile phones, broadcasting equipment and mirrorless cameras for example. But it also includes other Sony enterprises such as Sony’s Music industry.
Sony Pictures which continues to release theatrical excrement such as “Dumb Money”, a mockumentary that glosses over the hilarious hedge fund failure to short Game Stock by depicting GME holders as being a bunch of retarded nerds.
Oh yeah, Sony’s Entertainment, Technology, and Services division also includes a little something called Sony Interactive Entertainment, their whole segment dedicated to the PlayStation ecosystem, from hardware and software sales to malicious services such as PlayStation Plus.
In terms of hardware sales, the future hasn’t looked brighter for Sony who indicate 4.9 Million PlayStation 5 consoles were shipped during this quarter, an increase of 1.6 million consoles versus the previous year, with Sony having shipped (not sold) 46.6 million PlayStation 5 consoles to date since its initial launch three years ago.
In terms of actual sales figures Sony maintains their sales target for the PS5 at 25 million units for this financial year which is immensely ambitious given how they’ve only sold around 8.2 million console units up until this point, less than a third of their intended goal which they hope to achieve during the holiday rush.
On the notion of PlayStation, its total revenue has increased by nearly one-third compared to the corresponding period last year, reaching slightly over $6.6 billion USD, accompanied by an operating profit of approximately $339 million USD.
Concerning software sales, approximately one-third of the 67.6 million PS4 and PS5 titles sold in the last quarter were in physical form, while the majority were digital sales.
PlayStation Network monthly active users (MAU) saw a five million increase year-over-year, reaching 107 million. Sony defines MAU as the estimated total number of unique accounts that engaged in playing games or utilizing services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter.
Interestingly, despite physical software sales accounting for only 4% of income, digital software sales constituted a substantial 21%, illustrating the importance of these console manufacturers to push towards an all digital future as consumers will gladly pay the same amount of money for digital releases which clearly offer greater profit margins for all parties involved.
Sony has been hard at work constantly tweaking the design of the PlayStation 5 console itself, skimping out in its cooling potential, lowering its weight over time with revision after revision, with their latest to provide a “slim” variant of the console which takes the revised 6nm SoC and once again removes needless bulk and weight such as its heatsink to reduce production costs where the savings are most certainly not passed onto the consumer.
Out of the 67.6 million games sold for the PlayStation, just 4.7 million of them were actually first-party titles, a 28% decline from this time last year, because of course it has to be said once again that the PlayStation 5 barely has any exclusive titles to its lonesome.
99.98% of the library for the PlayStation 5 are multiplatform titles, their first-party lineup is severely lacking, considering how Sony has put a lot of emphasis of porting their first-party releases onto the PC.
Apparently they designed this drive to improve loading times but that’s all I know.
Expect first-party sales to increase however, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 may be propaganda disguised as a video game, but it has sold over 5 million copies, though by the time Sony’s next quarterly report comes along I’d wager that Spider-Man 2 will already have a PC release date announced so there goes that “first-party” badge of honor.
Sony have been rampantly downsizing its gaming divisions, with the likes of Bungie axing staff among a plethora of their visual arts team being let go as well, from Naughty Dog to Media Molecule, all of them are laying off staff members.
Because Sony has a serious issue on their hands when it comes to their first-party games, considering how their games are essentially interactive Hollywood thrillers, where action is replaced with a cinematic experience and mundane button mashing, their budget is ballooning as if they were an actual Hollywood creation.
Sony’s first-party games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us Part 2 have budgets ranging in the hundred of millions of dollars and even despite shifting tens of millions of units, Sony isn’t making much of a profit with these games.
It’s plain and simple, their first-party titles aren’t coming out thick and thin, over the past three years there has been but a handful of actual titles limited to the PlayStation ecosystem let alone a PlayStation 5 exclusive title, as the console wars persist the PlayStation 5 is the most popular console to enjoy multiplatform releases, with Nintendo’s Switch actually having a library of exclusive titles to their lonesome.
Everything under the PlayStation moniker either has or will be ported onto the PC at an undisclosed date.
Nevertheless these are still “great” results for Sony’s PlayStation division but it’s pretty clear as day that overall revenue is shifting away from software sales more towards hardware sales instead, there have been zero price cuts for the PlayStation 5 system since release, in fact it has only gotten more expensive as Sony continually tweaks and adjusts the packaging to be more streamlined and economically efficient for mass production.
