Unbelievable. Not only did they meet their very high targets but they exceeded it by 0.1m. 25m forecast for this fiscal year is very encouraging. That likely means 25-26m shipped this Calendar year.

They are exceeding all expectations and at this stage this year seems sure to be the greatest PlayStation sales on record.

And by a decent margin. Not to mention at a damn high pricetag.

Not gonna lie though, everything outside hardware is a bit disappointing. Seems like PS4's decline is still keeping up with PS5's rapid growth. Sony expects a decline in first party software sales in FY2023, which suggests they don't have any big games coming this year outside Spider-Man 2 and maybe live service F2P's. Did they share their PC software results?

There's not necessarily nothing else big coming. Remember that 2022 had: Uncharted Collection, Gran Turismo 7, Horizon Forbidden West, TLOU Part 1 and God of War Ragnarok.

Spiderman 2 and another major title isn't necessarily covering all that. But it depends on what you consider a "big game".

I guess by big game I mean 10 million + sellers (lifetime). Sony's software sales on Playstation have been declining for how long now? 3 years? I was half expecting them to pick up by this point.

@trunkswd

Thank you very much. And a big compliment for the estimates you had put up before Sony reported Q4 earnings. They were spot on!

To the news: Ah, man, wonderful, just wonderful. Congrats to Sony and everyone who finally got their hands on a PS5. It's going to be a very interesting year!

Previously the 23m figure for God of War was taken as including PC sales, however the supplemental information here does not state that it includes PC sales like Horizon Zero Dawn. They are saying it sold 23m on PS4 alone.

I do know it was down 3% year on year.

Last quarter they only sold abit over 68m games (they had a few quarters in the 80-100m range, in the past 4years, it varies)
(for compairsion, last Quarter the Nintendo switch sold 76m games)

Here is how the last 4 years (for sony PS4/PS5 total) of software sales looks:

It goes up and down.
Natureally with PS4 dieing down, and PS5 starting up, I assume it will grow overtime, as more install base of PS5 are out there (who will want games to play on a new system).

First party sales were about the same this FY so we can mainly attribute the drop in software sales to a 3rd party decline. If it wasn't for Hogwarts it would have been even larger. 

The major games:

Resident Evil Village - May 2021
Mass Effect Legendary - May 2021
Fifa 22 - October 2021
Far Cry 6 - October 2021
Back 4 Blood - October 2021
Call of Duty Vanguard - November 2021
GTA Trilogy - November 2021
Battlefield 2042 - November 2021
Dying Light 2 - February 2022
Elden Ring - February 2022
GTA V (PS5/XSX) - March 2022
Tiny Tina's Wonderland - March 2022

Lego Star Wars: Skywalker Saga - April 2022
Saints Row (lol) - August 2022
Fifa 23 - September 2022
A Plauge Tale: Requiem - October 2022
Gotham Knights - October 2022
Call of Duty Modern Warfare II - October 2022
Need for Speed Unbound - December 2022
Monster Hunter Rise - January 2023
Forspoken - January 2023
Dead Space - January 2023
Hogwarts Legacy - February 2023
Resident Evil 4 - March 2023

I think last FY easily wins that battle. Battlefield 2042 while not being received well was one of the highest grossing games of the year in the USA. RE Village also counted for almost 12 months while RE4 for this year got about a week of sales. Forspoken, Deadspace, Gotham Knights and Saints Row were all sales dissapointments and MHR is unlikely to have sold that well on PS4/PS5 considering how late a release it was. So all around it was a very poor year for third party sales.

Hey, great work on these numbers, I always find the charts here extremely useful.

However, I would like to point out that I do not believe you are using the correct definition for shipped here(unless I am misunderstanding). Shipped is not the numbers that have been put into the boat ready to go, but the number that will have been sold to retailers(although not necessarily final customers or even made it to the retailer). Receiving payment is key because these are realised sales for Sony, in the Financial Reporting a unit Shipped is a unit sold, and the units shipped would need to correlate with the HW revenue. I’m not a huge expert on this kind of shipping but I’d imagine Sony only receive payment when units have made it into warehouse and distribution centres ready to be delivered to retailers, and not when they are loaded into the ship.

Additionally, if the number shipped was the number that had been loaded into the ships it would be significantly larger than 2.1M. Since the shipping process takes about 6 weeks to major territories like NA and Europe, and the routing through distribution centres to retailers would also takes another couple of weeks then it would be reasonable to assume that maybe only 1/3 of the units that made it into the boat in a Q would make it to retail that quarter. Disparity would be 4m+.

I believe one quarter last Year Sony referenced the number of consoles manufactured during the quarter and it was several million units more than the number shipped, which would make sense if their shipped number is lagging by 2 months as it takes that long to realise the sale and become “shipped”.

So in summary I believe that the disparity would be accounted for solely by units bought from Sony by retailer but not made it to final sale yet.

I'm going to assume people are no longer skeptical of the ps5 hitting 100 million.