After Mark Cerny talked up some of the features of the new, upcoming Next Generation PlayStation console, Sony has been silent regarding the new game console. However, in an earnings report intended for investors, Sony said that they’ve experienced an “increase in development expenses for the next generation console.”
According to a journalist working for Kotaku, some developers got or are getting dev kits, so Sony wanted to get ahead of the leaks…
That’s not all, in a follow-up with the press, Sony said that the PlayStation 5 is still more than a year away from launching. This is not at all surprising for me, because usually, Sony designs their consoles to have a 10 year lifecycle, starting with PS2. We are on the 6th year, and even though that sales have slowed somewhat, there’s still some life left on the current PS4. Furthermore, during an investor call in March 2018, Sony said that the PlayStation 4 is entering its “final phase of its life cycle.” There is however, speculation that the console would either launch in 2020, or 2021.
As I mentioned, sales of PlayStation 4 have slowed down quite a bit. According to Sony, the PS4 sold 17.8 Million consoles for the financial 2018 year, of that is 2.9 Million is between January and March 2019. That is 1.2 Million down from the previous financial year. However, the good news is that not only did Sony meet their projections, they exceeded it by .03 Million. This is possibly because of the software output they’ve done over the financial year 2018. This is being reflected in their games division making the best profit in PlayStation history.
While the PlayStation console sales have been dipping for years, other parts of PlayStation made up for the losses. According to Sony, there are 36.4 Million PlayStation Plus subscribers across PS3, PSVita, and PS4. The overall PlayStation Network ecosystem is doing well, too. According to Sony, digital sales across DLC’s, full-game downloads, PlayStation Plus, and the PlayStation Now streaming service accounts for $12.8 Billion for the financial year. The “Game and Network Services” accounted for $20.9 Billion. To date, Sony sold 96.8 million PS4 consoles worldwide, and 87.4 Million PS3 consoles worldwide. [These numbers are from SIE’s business/financial data website. Images below are attached in case the company changes the page.]
Stay tuned for more information about the Next Generation PlayStation console, presumably named PlayStation 5.
