Sony released its latest financial performance for the first quarter of 2024 (April 1 to June 30).
According to Sony, 2.4 million PS5 consoles were sold in the first quarter. This was down from the 3.3 million units sold in the first quarter of 2023, but was expected. As this generation of consoles enters its fourth year on the market, it’s only natural that sales will decline. Total sales of the PlayStation 5 game console have now reached 61.7 million units, trailing only the 1983 total sales of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) by hundreds of thousands of units.
By comparison, Nintendo sold about 2.1 million Switch consoles last quarter. Xbox didn’t give exact numbers, but we do know that their hardware sales were down 42% from the previous quarter.
It’s important to remember that the PS5 hasn’t had a permanent price cut yet, so Sony can still increase sales.
Software sales increased nearly 20% over last year, with the G&NS division’s revenue equivalent to $3.3 billion. Add-on sales accounted for a large part of this, growing 37%. Overall PlayStation game sales in the first quarter were 56.5 million copies. 80% of them are digital.
PlayStation Network also saw an increase in total active users, although Sony didn’t provide a correct breakdown of the number of users per tier. PSN currently has 116 million active users, compared with 108 million in the same period last year. There are also 118 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, so the number remains unchanged.
Considering this number and total PS5 sales, we can deduce that 56.3 million users come from PS4 and other Sony hardware. Sony previously confirmed that there are 49 million active users playing games on PS4. However, this number doesn’t quite make sense, as it seems unlikely that another 7 million users will buy a PS4 or even an older machine and sign up for PSN.
All in all, the Sony looks good. Although gaming performance for consoles has been fairly quiet this year, the gaming division’s overall revenue grew 32%. As a result, Sony raised its 2024 forecast by another 3%. The hardware drop may be a bit more severe than Sony would have liked, but it’s still within expectations.
