Sony’s quarterly report shows 17.3 million sales figure for PlayStation 5, still lagging behind PS4

Gaming has been in the news a lot lately, with significant acquisitions rocking the boat left and right. However, headline-grabbing purchases don’t tell us much about the health of a company. To find that out, we need to dive into their financial data, and the best time to do that is when they release their quarterly reports. With the release of Sony’s fourth-quarter data from last year, we can get extra information about the real state of play.

There is a lot of data to slog through, much of it not relevant to gaming, but here are a few key takeaways from the quarterly report:

Supply issues are still plaguing the PlayStation 5. This is particularly worrying when compared to the PlayStation 4’s sales at the same point in its life cycle. Despite selling in comparable numbers to the previous generation for the first year after its release, last quarter represented the first full holiday season for the PS5, and it sold 3.9 million units. This doesn’t compare well to the PS4, which sold 6.4 million units during the same period in 2014.

Sony’s Gaming and Network Services Segment did not meet revenue forecasts for the year. This is largely due to the lower than expected sales of the PS5 during the holiday season 2021, but that also had a trickle-down effect on sales of first-party gaming titles.

It is almost counter-intuitive, but the lower sales didn’t impact Sony’s profit from their gaming division. Operating profit was higher than forecast because the cost of producing the PS5 and running the PlayStation side of the company has fallen more than expected over the past year. So, while sales were almost $1.5 billion less than forecast, they are still made just under $175 million more in profit than they expected during the quarter.

The number of people paying for the PS Plus service rose over the course of 2021 to a total of 48 million, compared to 47.4 million at the end of 2020.

It is worth noting that this data only covers the October-December 2021 period, so it will not take into account developments like Sony’s recent purchase of Bungie or Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard.