As PS5 hits 65M consoles, Sony president signals return to single-player games

As Sony announced its PlayStation 5 lifetime sales of shipped units surpassed 65 million in its most recent quarter, Sony’s president Hiroki Totoki said the company is focusing on major single-player games for its future.

Sony’s single-player games like God of War have been the staple of Sony’s successful game consoles, but the company experimented with live-service games such as Concord, a game that was eight years in the making and reportedly cost hundreds of millions to make. The game launched this year, failed, and Sony shut down the Firewalk Studios division that made the game.

Totoki, who is also COO and CFO, said in an analyst call that PlayStation needs to needs to have more detailed checks and balances, including more user tests, to prevent disasters like Concord. In contrast to that failure, Helldivers 2, a third party game from Arrowhead, was a live service game that sold 12 million copies earlier this year.

“We need to repeat those gates more so that we could have caught and determine whether that will be accepted by the users or not. We need to have more information that will enable us to make more sound decisions… Looking back on the past, I think we need to go back to the basics and make it really stronger,” Totoki said.

At the same time, Sony executives said in an analyst call that, starting with Ghost of Yōtei, which is a sequel to the smash hit Ghost of Tsushima, the company plans to continue releasing major single-player game titles every year from next fiscal year onwards.

For the second fiscal quarter ended September 30, Sony reported sales for the game and network services division rose 12% to $7.01 billion, while operating profits rose 2.8 times over a year ago. The strong quarter came from sales of third-party software, though hardware sales were weaker. Sony increased its forecast to $29.4 billion, with operating income expected to grow too.

Sony noted it has 116 million PlayStation monthly active users, up 8% from a year ago. Total play time also increased 14% compared to the same month last year. PlayStation Plus was up 18% from a year ago, with higher average revenue per user.

Third-party software, sales significantly grew due to contributions from solid franchise titles as well as hit new intellectual property, including a new sports title and an action RPG title from China. I’ll presume that is EA Sports College Football and Black Myth Wukong.

Astro Bot sold 1.5 million copies, and 37% of the users who purchased Astro Bot had not purchased a first-party title from Sony in the last two years.

The percentage of younger age groups and families purchasing the title was much higher than other titles, and the title is contributing significantly to a widening of the user base, Sony said.

Going forward, Totoki said, “We intend to build an optimal title portfolio during the current midrange plan period that combines single-player games, which are our strength, and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP, with live service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”

In the studio business, Sony expects sales and profits to decline in the second half of this fiscal year compared to the same period of last fiscal year, when Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Helldivers 2 were huge
hits. However, Sony said it is making steady progress in the development of new titles and in improving its live service game processes.