Offering games at 80 € on PS5 is ultimately not that profitable for Sony. In any case, this is what the manufacturer’s financial results for the financial year ended March 31, 2023 reveal. If players inevitably spend more money on a game, they limit their choice by ultimately buying fewer games per game. year.
While the PS5 has just exploded all sales records in the first quarter of 2023 with no less than 6.3 million consoles sold. Thanks to this performance, Sony recorded the best results ever recorded for the Playstation division, with a turnover of nearly 27 billion dollars.
Of course, the manufacturer can thank the sales of PS5 and PS4 which generated an exceptional turnover of $8.297 billion in fiscal year 2022. And while software sales are also doing well at Sony, with profits exceeding $6.367 billion, the same cannot be said for overall game sales.
Playstations sell well, games a little less
Indeed, in the 2022 fiscal year, Sony sold 264.2 million games, i.e. a decrease of 39 million units compared to 2021. You will agree, these figures are surprising. Ordinarily, an increase in console sales is usually followed by an increase in game sales. But that’s not the case here with the PS5.
Why that ? The price of games partly explains this trend. Since the launch of the PS5 in November 2020, Sony has decided to increase the entry ticket for Playstation exclusives, with a price set at €79.99 instead of the traditional €69.99.
In the process, many publishers such as Ubisoft or EA have chosen to apply this new price list for their next-gen productions. And faced with this price increase, players have adapted. Result, they spend more money on a single title of course, but in return they buy fewer games per year.
More expensive and therefore fewer purchases
During the presentation of the results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023, Sony confirmed that third-party game sales fell by 38.6 million on the Playstation Store. And to illustrate this phenomenon, the example of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is particularly telling.
In the first 10 days after its release in October 2022, the Activision title generated nearly $1 billion in revenue. And contrary to what one might think, the launch of the king of FPS did not boost overall game sales. During the third quarter of 2022, Sony sold a total of 86.5 million titles, including 65.7 million third-party games. Compared to the 3rd quarter of 2021, this represents a drop of 6.2 million in sales. As you will have understood, the case of COD MW2 perfectly describes this trend: players who prefer to devote their budget to a single title to the detriment of other releases.
Source : sony
