Yeah, poor first party production is part of it, but even last year with 4 major releases (2 of which actually released at the end FY2021, but had the bulk of their sales in FY 2022) still declined over the prior year This FY could be their weakest since like 2017, and the next year will probably be notably weaker without a Spider-Man 2 equivalent.

Ragnarok and Horizon's legs are disappointing. Only GT7 is hinting strong legs relative to expectations and based on charts. I think the evidence is clear that high prices and PC ports are hurting legs.

At Bold.

I said the same thing in the switch quarterly thread, and I will repeat it here concerning the Ps5. People were mass buying the consoles in Japan due to the extremely weak yen. Their buddies see that they got a new console and there is a little bit of a trickle effect with a lot of people buying through official channels too in these untracked markets. (mostly Japan adjacent countries)

Sony didn't revise their forecast for the fiscal.
They are dead set on hitting that 25 million.

I dont believe they will hit the target. Sales of consoles and games will start to slow down due to the crazy increase of PS Plus prices.

Sony keeping their forecast of 25M for the Quarter seems like a strong indicator that they are confident on their plan for this quarter. And perhaps their hint of titles that were delayed from 2023 may indicate a release in the financial Q4 and even bring unexpected sales of HW.
And with only 1M difference to clear now and SM2 launch I think it may pass PS4 in October instead of November, and is still very much aligned with Sony forecast of an earlier quarterly result.

Is this the first time Sony doesn't announce the PSN subs in their quarterly report?

Choosing to disclose MAU and not actuall sub numbers probably means it was bad.

They didn't announce them for the April-June quarter either. They stopped announcing them this fiscal year. Network Services revenue is up by over 14% compared to last year. Network services is just PS+ and Advertising.

So in terms of revenue they are doing better than last year but in terms of actual sub numbers they may be lower. Difficult to say as the price increase didn't occur until September 3rd and only 12-month subs increased in price. So we can't say "revenue is higher so subs must be higher!" and we also can't say "well sub prices increased by x% and revenue only increased by 14% so subs must be lower!" because we don't know how many people are on the 12-month sub compared to 1/3 or how many were up for renewal in the month of September.

Basically we know it's bringing in more money than last year but we can't say with complete confidence that they have more or less users than last year.

The price increase will surely hit them in the short term.

They just keeping rising it, around here is now almost the double it was 2 years ago (was BRL 150 until mid 2021 and is BRL 280 now), and even as I still have some time stacked, I'm considering stopping renewing it for the first time since I've got it.

Yeah I think it's worse in other regions than here in the UK. Compared to gamepass for example it's not that bad here and definitely hasn't nearly doubled.

£50/year for Gamepass Core, £60/year for PS+ Essential.

£132/year for Gamepass Ultimate, £100/year for PS+ Extra and £120/year for PS+ Premium.

I'm sure the numbers of subscribers will decrease though potentially not by enough to stop their sub revenue continuing to increase.

You do realize that GP is still more expensive than PS Plus.  Are you saying that Xbox poor sales are due to their subscription prices?