Despite an aggressive advertising campaign and a package that includes a console and Marvel's Spider-Man 2Sony has revealed that it failed to meet sales expectations for the PlayStation 5 during the winter 2023 season. As a result, not only have sales expectations for the fiscal year overall been lowered, but It has been confirmed that the PS5 has entered the last stage of its life cycle.
As part of the financial report for the third quarter of the current fiscal year, which ended on December 31, 2023, Sony revealed that in this period 8.2 million PlayStation 5 were sold worldwide, which represents an increase compared to the 7.1 million that were registered in the same period of time last year. However, this was below what the company expected.
As you may recall, Sony had mentioned that it expected to sell 25 million PlayStation 5 between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024. However, after this below-expected performance, The company has changed its expectations, and now expects to sell 21 million units by the end of the current fiscal year. This is what Naomi Matsuoka, senior vice president of Sony, commented on the matter:
“Looking ahead, the PS5 will enter the last stage of its life cycle. Therefore, we will place more emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. For this reason, we expect the annual sales rate of PS5 hardware to begin to fall from the next fiscal year.”
The interesting thing is that Matsuoka has pointed out that The PlayStation 5 has entered the last stage of its life cycle. Let us remember that this console hit the market in November 2020, and is currently in its fourth year on the market. Although many have pointed out that it is too early to consider the decline of the PS5, let us remember that the PS4 was Sony's focus for seven years. In this way, it would not be unreasonable to think that the PS6 is only three or four years away.
Although at the moment there is no official information about the next PlayStation console, documents leaked as part of Microsoft's trial for the acquisition of Activision Blizzard indicated that The next generation of consoles, both for PlayStation and Xbox, would begin between 2027 and 2028.
After the complicated start of the generation, where the pandemic and the lack of chips caused the demand for the PS5 to be higher than the manufacturing of the console, Sony has gone to great lengths to bring this piece of hardware to everyone who wants to own one.. This resulted in a couple of years where the company's high expectations were met. However, it seems that this has stopped, and for the moment everyone who wants a PS5 already has one.
One of the ways to grow hardware sales is with exclusive games, and while there are third-party developers who will comply with this, it has also been revealed that PlayStation does not plan to launch new games in its largest franchises until the next fiscal year, that is that is, until April 2025. As a consequence, Hardware sales are expected to decline substantially in the next year. We can only wait to see how Sony plans to face the challenges that the next fiscal year represents. On related topics, you can learn more about the lack of first party exclusives here. Likewise, this would be the new PlayStation property.
Editor's Note:
With this information, it is questioned whether the PS5 will be able to surpass the PS2, something that many pointed out after seeing the great performance that the console had in recent years. While this revelation is discouraging, it is important to mention that selling 21 million units in one year is still a great achievement, but not what was expected.
Via: Bloomberg
#PS5 #enters #stage #life #cycle #Atomix
