According to a report by Bloomberg, Sony is forecasting that it will sell 4 million fewer PS5 consoles during the 2023 fiscal year, which ends on March 31, compared to its previous forecast. The revision came as part of the release of its third-quarter financial results, in which Sony lowered its PS5 sales figure from the 25 million consoles it expected to sell to 21 million.
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Although Sony PS5 sales increased in the third quarter, to 8.2 million units from 6.3 million the year before, Bloomberg notes that this was about a million units lower than previously forecast. This is despite the release of the big title Spider-Man 2, strong sales of third-party titles, and the launch of a new, slimmer PS5 in November.
In the third quarter, revenue from Sony's gaming division rose 16% compared to the same period last year, reaching about $9.3 billion, but profit fell 26% to about $572 million, due to promotions in the third quarter ended Dec. 31.
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According to Sony, the company plans to focus on profitability rather than unit sales as the console approaches its fourth anniversary. “Looking ahead, the PS5 will enter the final phase of its life cycle,” Sony vice president Naomi Matsuoka, according to reports from Bloomberg. “For this reason, we will place greater emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. Because of this, we expect the annual sales rate of the PS5 to begin to decline from the next fiscal year.” Sony added that it has no plans to release “new titles for existing games” in the next fiscal year.
The console market is set to get even more competitive in 2024. Microsoft is expected to release a refreshed Xbox Series S and a disc-less Xbox Series X codenamed Brooklin later this year , with twice the storage of the current model, while a new version of the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch is also expected. There are also rumors of new hardware from Sony, with a PS5 Pro likely to be released in late 2024.
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What are the main differences between the PS5 and other next-gen consoles?
The PS5 console has an AMD Zen 2 processor with 8 cores, running at 3.5 GHz. This makes it more powerful than the Xbox Series S, but less powerful than the Xbox Series X. The PS5 also uses an AMD RDNA 2 graphics card, which can produce 10.28 teraflops at 2.23 GHz. This is less than the Xbox Series X, but more than the Xbox Series S. The PS5 has 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, which is the same as the Xbox Series X, but more than the Xbox Series S, which only has 10GB. It also has an 825GB SSD for storage, which is faster than the hard drives used in the Xbox Series X and S, but has less capacity. Finally, the PS5 supports ray tracing technology, which allows graphics to look more realistic. This is something that the Xbox Series S does not support, but the Xbox Series X does.
Source: theverge
