Sony Expects Weaker Year in Game Sales and Wants to Sell 25 Million PS5 Consoles in FY24

First the good news. Sony assured investors that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be released this fiscal year, which ends for the company on 3/31/2024. Previously, the Insomniac Games studio stated fall 2023. But that probably hasn’t changed (insiders most often mention September). However, it looks like a weaker year in terms of games.

Sony wants to sell 25 million PS5 consoles during the fiscal year, which is the most of any PlayStation in history. In the previous fiscal year, it was 19.1 million units. If the corporation succeeds in this, the PS5 will go down in history, as not even the PS2 managed to sell so many units in one fiscal year.

At the same time, Sony is expecting less sales of first-party games. Unfortunately, she did not specify why she expects less interest in titles created by teams within PlayStation Studios. However, speculations started immediately that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 might be the only big fist-party game this year. But such conjectures are not supported by anything. However, for now, Sony only really has a sequel to the spider adventure announced for the coming months.

“We’re trying to create brand new brands, release titles on PC and strengthen the development of live service games,” added a Sony representative. In doing so, he confirmed the earlier strategy of focusing not only on single-player story games, but also on online multiplayer games. One of them will be a separate multiplayer action set in the world of The Last of Us, the project is being prepared by Naughty Dog. Guerrilla Games is preparing a cooperative game from the world of Horizon.

Analyst Hideki Yasuda from Toyo Securities is in favor Bloomberg notices weak software acceleration and de facto stagnation of online services. PlayStation is doing well to sell the PS5 (38.4 million units shipped in total), so the hardware business is in perfect shape, but the other two parts are struggling.

“Hardware sales rise in line with Sony’s forecasts, but acceleration in software, the most profitable part of the games business, remains weak,” Yasuda told Bloomberg, pointing to a 2.5 million drop in software sales from the same period in the previous fiscal year. 68 million games were sold. 9.5 million units were first-party titles from PlayStation Studios, which is 5 million less. 70% of software sold were digital versions, down 1% from the same period last year.

Shuehei Yoshida, who is in charge of independent developers at PlayStation, does not want live service games to dominate the industry, because he considers them more boring. Nevertheless, Sony wants to launch by 2025 up to 12 such projects. To maintain and continue to see PlayStation as the best place to play games, they experiment studies and embark on new ideas. But as Yoshida revealed, many of them will fail and be cancelled.

“We’ll make a prototype, evaluate it and decide whether to spend more time and resources or just stop it. We canceled so many games,” revealed Yoshida for The Guardian. When disruption occurs, they try to convince developers that the concept needs to be scrapped so they don’t get stuck with something that has no perspective.

“We usually work with people with very strong ideas. We like such people, so trying to change or stop their ideas is very difficult. In this industry, it’s all about talent. I try to help as much as I can,” he added.

Sony has to decide which projects to allow and which not to. This is especially important in today’s day and age when development costs are rising year-on-year. Companies have had to deal with extreme growth as they transition from one generation to the next. Compared to the PS3 era, current projects can cost 3x more.

We learned from Yoshida that development of God of War 3 cost 44 million dollars, but current God of War Ragnarök for the PS5 and PS4, it cost nearly $200 million.

Although Sony never confirmed it, it was supposed to cancel Uncharted and the sequel Days Gone for the PS5.

Japanese company will increase acquisition costs by 20% year-on-year. It is likely that Sony will buy another studio itself, or continue to expand its existing teams. It announced this month that it was buying Firewalk with former Call of Duty and Destiny developers. Here are other acquisitions:

• Nixxes Software (2021), specialists in porting games to PC
• Bluepoint Games (2021), authors of the Demon’s Souls remake
• Firesprite (2021), developers of PS VR games
• Fabrik Games (2021), Firesprite studio support team
• Housemarque (2021) by Returnal writers
• Valkyrie Entertainment (2021), a supporting studio, assisted with inFamous and God of War
• Bungie (2022), the studio behind Destiny
• Haven Studios (2022), led by Jade Raymond, develops live-service games
• Savage Game Studios (2022), mobile game developers

PC gamers can look forward to more PlayStation games for PC. Sony intends to continue with the strategy in the coming months. Maybe the long-awaited samurai event will finally happen Ghost of Tsushima by Sucker Punch, which would complement Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part 1, Days Gone and other Sony games on PC. Let’s just hope the port is optimized this time.