During the company’s Q3 earnings briefing, Sony Interactive Entertainment confirmed that it company does not plan to release “any new major existing franchise titles for PlayStation 5 before March 31, 2025. Sony Group president Hiroki Totoki used God of War Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 as titles that fall into this category (Thanks, Gematsu).
The latest financials results confirm that PlayStation 5 sales reached a total of 54.8 million units worldwide as of December 31, 2023. Sales for the console are up year-over-year, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 surpassed the 10 million sales milestone. However, PlayStation fans will need to keep waiting for sequels to existing IPs.
PlayStation Outlook for Next Fiscal Year Sees a Decline in Major Titles
According to the Sony president, major projects are currently in development at PlayStation, but there are no plans to release any new major existing franchise titles in the next fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2025. As a result, hardware and software sales are expected to decline. Third-party software sales and network service revenue is expected to increase, however.
“Regarding first-party software, we aim to continue to focus on producing high-quality works and developing live service games, Totoki said. “But while major projects are currently under development, we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year like God of War Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.”
Totoki continued, “Although the burden of acquisition related costs will ease next fiscal year, we expect profit from first-party software to decrease slightly from this fiscal year due to the impact of the decrease in sales. Due to this, operating income for the next fiscal year is currently expected to increase slightly from this fiscal year. However, while this our baseline, we are reviewing measures for further improvement in profitability in advance of the annual forecast results announcement this May.”
“Regarding the PlayStation 5 hardware, which will enter its fifth year since launch, partially due to its entering the latter half of the console cycle, we aim to optimize sales with a greater emphasis on balance with profits, so we anticipate a gradual decline in unit sales from next fiscal year onwards. We expect third-party software sales to continue to expand gradually due to the expansion of the PlayStation 5 install base and the high level of user engagement. In network services, we expect subscribers to be on par with this fiscal year or slightly less due to the impact of price revision we implemented in this fiscal year, but we expect sales to gradually expand due to a shift to attractive premium services.”
