The PlayStation 5 console is continuing to sell rather well, but the pace of sales is slowing down faster than anticipated.
In today’s financial report for the first quarter of FY24, the Japanese company confirmed 2.4 million units were sold during the quarter, below the 3 million units that analysts had expected, bringing the total number of sold units to 61.7 million units. Despite the excellent number of units sold, the current generation console seems to be trailing behind its predecessor, as the PlayStation 4 sold 63.5 million units in a similar time frame.
According to Morning Star Investment director Kazunori Ito, as reported by Bloomberg, however, the PlayStation business is not doing as well as the numbers suggest because profits and revenue were inflated by the weak yen. Sony was expecting that sales would slow down this fiscal year, but they are slowing faster than they had anticipated. With the lack of big first-party releases, that was to be expected.
It will be interesting to see if the rumored PlayStation 5 Pro will turn things around and how much of a difference it will make. According to rumors, the system should be revealed next month for a late 2024 launch, but without any big first-party game launching for some time, the system will need to be rather impressive for players to upgrade their base PS5 systems without any sort of killer application.
