During Sony’s quarterly financial conference call for media, investors, and analysts, Chief Financial Officer Lin Tao provided some relevant information on the performance of the PlayStation business.
During the livestreamed presentation, Tao mentioned that the “PlayStation Platform continues to demonstrate its strength as the best place to play and best place to publish.”
In terms of user engagement, monthly active users in September were up 3% compared to the previous year. Total playtime for the quarter between July and September also increased 1% year-on-year.
Tao added that game software and network sales are “steadily growing,” and Sony expects this trend to continue in the second half of the fiscal year due to users continuing to shift to higher tiers of PlayStation Plus and the contribution of first-party titles.
As for the PS5 hardware, Sony plans to expand its installed base during the Holiday season while continuing to balance that expansion with the profitability of the entire segment (which, in financialese, likely means that we shouldn’t expect groundbreaking discounts, albeit this is just my interpretation and you should take it with the customary grain of salt).
Tao also mentioned that, while performance varies by title, live service games account for over 40% of Sony’s first-party software revenue, which is similar to the previous quarter, and it’s a recurring source of revenue.
That being said, partly due to changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement for Destiny 2 have not reached the expectations Sony had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While Tao says that the company will continue to improve the situation, it has revised the business projection downward, and this is why Sony recorded the impairment loss against the assets at Bungie mentioned earlier today.
On the other hand, Helldivers 2 is doing “extremely well” and Tao mentioned the recent release on Xbox, adding that the game isn’t just attracting new users on Microsoft’s console, but it also saw increased engagement from existing users on PS5 and PC. This resulted in a significant increase in sales year-on-year for Arrowhead’s game.
MLB: The Show 25 also “continued to perform well” during Q2.
Tao then mentioned the 3.3 million units shipped figure for Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yōtei, defining it as a “major hit like its predecessor,” Ghost of Tsushima.
She concluded the prepared remarks on the gaming segment, mentioning that building on this recent progress, Sony plans “to strengthen its studio business and expand its franchises via continuous learning and improvement.”
After that, during the Q&A session, Tao spoke about Marathon, mentioning that Bungie is still working on it, and at the end of October, there was an extensive technical test involving 18,000 users. The test was meant to gauge the gameplay and user retention, and Sony is in the process of analyzing the results.
Corrections will be made depending on that analysis, and Sony remains fully committed to launching the game, with the unchanged assumption that it will release this fiscal year (by the end of March 2026). Its earnings are included in the company’s financial forecast for the full year announced today.
In response to another question, Tao mentioned that the installed base of the PS5 is growing even if it’s in its sixth year since launch. Looking at the life cycle of the PS4, which still enjoys many active users despite being so old, compared to conventional console life cycles, the current ones are becoming longer and longer.
From that perspective, Sony believes that the PS5 is “only in the middle of its journey” and the plan is to expand its installed base even further, including in the upcoming Holiday season, while keeping in mind the lifetime value for the users and profitability.
She then declined to respond about future hardware launches and successors for the console. She also refused to answer about the possibility of increasing the price of games.
Tao also confirmed that the company believes it’ll be able to reach its goal of 15 million PS5 units shipped in the whole fiscal year (between April 2025 and March 2026). It’s worth mentioning that the console shipped 2.5 million units in Q1 and 3.9 million in Q2, for a total of 6.4 million units.
This means that Sony expects to sell over 8.6 million units in the second half of the year. If achieved, this would bring the lifetime total shipments for the console to 92.8 million units by March 2026.
Tao then explained that the company has already secured the components required for its PS5 production for the remainder of the fiscal year, so fluctuations in memory prices won’t affect profitability in the short term. That being said, this is something Sony will keep a close eye on, because an increase in the price of components will obviously impact profitability in the longer term.
That being said, since the console has already achieved an installed base of over 80 million, and assuming this number will grow further next year, the priority will be on monetizing the installed base that has already been secured, over focusing on the profitability of new hardware sales.
If you’d like to learn more about Sony’s financial results and an update on PS5 lifetime sales, you can check out our dedicated article from earlier today.
