Sony announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, related to the period between July and September, alongside the traditional update on PS5 shipments.
According to the financial documents provided by the house of PlayStation, 3.9 million PS5 units were sold in the quarter, bringing the lifetime total to 84.2 million units.
Of course, if you like competition, this is lower than the Nintendo Switch 2’s 4.54 million units shipped in the quarter. That being said, we can’t really present it as an apples-to-apples comparison. The Switch 2 is a new console, and the PS5 is in the second half of its life cycle. The fact that Sony managed to get this close to a brand-new console is actually rather impressive.
Looking at pure financial results, net sales for the Game & Network segment (which includes PlayStation and PlayStation Network) were 41.6 billion yen, up 4% year-on-year, driven by growth in network services and sales of games.
In terms of profits, operating income was 18.5 billion yen, down 13% year-on-year. The drop was partly due to impairment losses “against a portion of Bungie’s intangible and other assets in connection with Destiny 2,” on top of the recording of expenses resulting from a correction in previously capitalized development costs.
This was partly offset by the increase in sales from network services. Without the non-recurring losses, operating income would have increased 23% year-on-year.
Sony once again changed its forecast for the segment for the full fiscal year, increasing by 3% its sales guidance to 4,470 billion yen, partly due to an increase in revenue from hardware.
On the other hand, the forecast for operating income remains unchanged at 500 billion yen, including 30 billion yen of impact from tariffs, 31.5 billion yen from the impairment losses related to Bungie, and 18.3 billion yen from the correction of development costs.
This is partly offset by a decrease in losses from hardware sales (which confirms that the PS5 hardware is still sold at a loss, although a smaller loss compared to last year) and the increase in sales from network services.
PlayStation Network’s monthly active users for the quarter were 119 million, up from 116 million year-on-year, but down from 123 million in the previous quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Sony has not provided updates about PlayStation Plus subscribers for a few quarters.
We also learn that Ghost of Yōtei has sold 3.3 million copies as of November 2 since its release on October 2.
Speaking of software sales, during the quarter, 8.3 million PS5 and PS4 games were shipped, of which 6.3 million were published by Sony itself. The ratio of full-game digital downloads compared to the total was 72%.
Looking at Sony as a whole company, sales were 3,107.9 billion yen, up 5% year-on-year, while operating income was 429 billion yen, up 10% year-on-year.
If you’d like to compare with historical data, you can check out Sony’s financial results from the previous quarter, announced in August.
Other gaming companies have already announced their financial results this quarter, including Koei Tecmo, Electronic Arts, Capcom, Microsoft, Konami, Marvelous, Nintendo, Square Enix, Take-Two, and Sega. You can expect a few more reports on this topic in the coming days before the traditional financial results period ends.
