Production woes hamper next-gen success
Sony has released its latest financial results for the fiscal year ending March 2022. And while its powerful new platform PlayStation 5 has successfully surpassed an impressive 19.3 million shipments since its 2021 launch, the publisher has missed its overall second-year PS5 sales target by around three million units.
The industry giant shipped two million PS5 consoles in the first three months of 2022. While this is certainly not a number to be scoffed at, it is way down from the 3.3 million consoles shipped within the same timeframe in 2021, given the PS5’s young life. The figure drop has caused Sony to miss its initial prediction of over 14.8 million PS5 units shipped by Year Two by over three million units.
Regardless, Sony has noted that it remains “comfortable” with the success of PlayStation 5 to date, and is fully confident that it is on track to hit around 18 million PS5 shipments by the end of March 2023. Sony will have no doubt taken into account the ongoing production and distribution woes caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the component shortage crisis. These industry-wide issues have been causing prolonged chaos at all levels of global manufacturing.
In regards to Sony’s PlayStation Plus service, subscribers are actually down over the same period in 2021, representing the service’s first drop in users in years. This could be due to subscribers not renewing following the ending of COVID-19 lockdown legislation, users jumping ship to the Xbox and Xbox Game Pass, and players waiting for the arrival of the revamped PS Plus service before they stump up the dollar for another year.
At any rate, PlayStation Plus currently has 47.4 million subscribers total, so this drop in numbers is hardly anything for Sony to fret about. The revamped service — scheduled to launch in June 2022 — will no doubt bring many more players to the fold.
Finally, the humble PS4 is not quite out of the picture just yet, having still shipped 0.9 million consoles for a grand total of 117.2 million lifetime sales. It is quite clear at this point that the console is not going to surpass the incredible numbers (over 155 million) achieved by PlayStation 2. There’s no denying that PS4 gave it one hell of a shot, and currently sits proudly within the Top Five best-selling consoles ever.
