Sony presents its quarterly accounts with PlayStation reporting profits in all areas except consoles

After the presentation of the reports for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 by Nintendo and Microsoft, we only had to find out how Sony had fared as manufacturer and owner of PlayStation. Its competitors have reflected in their respective accounts reports that there is a significant drop in console hardware sales, and it has also affected PS5.

In the report we see that things seem to be going well in the Games and Network Services segment (i.e. PlayStation Plus). So much so that the profit forecast has been revised upwards by 3% compared to the previous year end. The cause of this has been, logically, an increase in sales and operating profit, especially in the first-party titles and services such as PlayStation Network, where they have 116 million monthly active users (a slight decrease compared to the previous quarter).

Although fewer software units have been sold compared to the same period last year, the percentage of digital sales has increased from 70 to 80%, so the profit is offset there. That also means that only one in five games sold by Sony is in physical format.

And while we’re on the subject of numbers, let’s look at what has happened in console sales. In the period between April and June 2024, 2.4 million PS5s were sold, a significant drop from the same period last year, when 3.3 million consoles were sold. A significant decline that has “slowed” PS5 worldwide to a total of 61.7 million consoles sold as of 30 June 2024.

Considering that Sony has not planned any triple-A releases of its most profitable franchises, the results are quite positive, although experts warn that if Sony wants to rebound PlayStation 5 sales, it needs new “console-selling” games.