Sony has lowered its annual profit outlook, warning that PlayStation game sales are weakening.
The forecast comes with Sony revealing that it sold 2.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the last quarter of 2022, only a 4 percent increase from the 2.3 million shipped in the same period last year. Total PS5 sales currently appear to be 21.7 million.
Hardware sales increased slightly year-over-year, while software sales fell 26 percent. Sony explains this decline this year compared to 2021 with a lack of major PlayStation games and less time spent playing games overall. Sony released the exclusive Gran Turismo 7 and Horizon Forbidden West games earlier this year, but Elden Ring went on sale on multiple platforms at once and garnered attention.
Sony previously predicted 18 million PlayStation 5 shipments for fiscal 2022, and the company has yet to revise that estimate.
Sony’s PlayStation game sales point to a slowdown in the gaming industry after the massive spike in the early stages of the pandemic. Microsoft doesn’t disclose its own Xbox hardware shipments, but the company saw an 11 percent drop in Xbox hardware revenue.
4919
