7.1 million units shipped in the fall of 2022
Sony has released its financial results for the fiscal period ending December 31, 2022, revealing that the PlayStation 5 (PS5) hardware has surpassed 32.1 million units shipped units since its fall 2020 launch.
As per the report, Sony shipped an additional 7.1m consoles in the three-month period ending December 31, 2022, a massive increase of 3.1m units of the same time frame in 2021. This is expected to be due to the increased manufacture and availability of PS5 consoles in the latter half of the year, following the extended period of production downtime in the console’s debut year, with both a lack of components and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic putting the brakes on the whole industry.
As a result of the increased shipment figures, Sony has raised its annual quarterly forecast for the remainder of the fiscal year. That is to say, the publisher now expects to ship a further 6.2m units worldwide in the current quarter, resulting in a grand total of 19m PS5 console shipments for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.
In addition to the hardware shipment figures, Sony announced that it sold 86.5m software units (combined PS4 & PS5) during the three-month period ending December 31, 2022. This number is down around 6.2m units on the same period in the previous fiscal year (92.7m). Also continuing to decline are PlayStation Plus subscriptions, with a total of 46.4m subscribers recorded December 31, 2022, a decrease of 1.6m from the same period in the previous fiscal year (48m).
Overall, however, PlayStation engagement is slightly up, with 112 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, a one million user increase on the same period ending December 2021.
