Today Sony hosted its quarterly financial conference call, and CFO and COO (and future CEO) Hiroki Totoki provided more insight into the performance of the PlayStation business and PS5.
During the livestreamed conference, which started with the farewell of current CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, Totoki-san mentioned that promotional expenses to sell PS5 hardware in the holiday quarter decreased by approximately 20% year-on-year, and Sony believes that it’s implementing an optimal sales program given the market environment.
PS5 inventory is being managed at an “appropriate level” and has decreased by 46% compared to the same month of the previous year. This significantly contributed to cash flow.
Total playtime on PlayStation increased by 2% year-on-year marking the seventh consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth. Interestingly, 42% of users who purchased a PS5 during the Holiday quarter were new users.
Another interesting tidbit of data is that cumulative PS5 units shipped are essentially at the same level as PS4 in the same timespan, despite the fact that PS5 has a higher price. Yet, Monthly Active Users have increased by 43% showing a significant expansion of the userbase due to backward compatibility and various user engagement initiatives.
Looking at PlayStation Plus, revenue has increased 20% year-on-year primarily due to an increase in average revenue per user as players are shifting to higher tiers of the service. As such, the momentum of the platform business is currently “strong” and Sony expects stable earnings growth going forward.
Speaking of PlayStation Portal, Sony aims to further improve the streaming user experience of the accessories by leveraging the feedback from the recent beta test, so that users can enjoy PlayStation games anytime, anywhere, and even more easily.
Totoki-san also mentioned the success at The Game Awards of Astro Bot and Helldivers 2, which are defined as titles in genres that Sony wants to expand in the future, games for families and live services. This is seen as a major step toward building a broader title portfolio.
Speaking of Helldivers 2, the release of Omens o Tyranny in December “more than doubled” daily active users (albeit, according to the slide below, this is a comparison between peak DAU in December against average DAU in November).
With the release of Ghost of Yotei a Death Stranding 2 in 2025, Sony expects revenue from first-party games to improve in the next fiscal year.
Later in the conference call, Totoki-san also mentioned that Sony has high expectations for PlayStation’s performance in the next fiscal year including both first and third-party games.
Interestingly, Sony expects the impact of US tariffs on its businesses to be minimal as they have made preparations to mitigate it. They also have no plans to move the headquarters outside of Japan. According to Totoki-san, “Tokyo is a really nice place.” We certainly agree, Totoki-san.
If you’d like to learn more about Sony’s financial results on top of an update on PS5 sales, you can read our dedicated article from earlier today.