We heard rumours earlier in the month that Sony may stop releasing future single-player PlayStation titles on PC. At the time, one of the rumoured reasoning was that games were not selling as well on PC. While we don’t have confirmation of that claim, something pointing to a similar direction has been found.
This comes via the LinkedIn page of one Jerry Liu, formerly the PC Planner & Insights Manager at PlayStation. Per the page, his tenure there spanned from January 2021 to June 2023. And while he was there, his claimed role was to “manage all business operations functions for PS PC group, helping the unit grow from US$0 – US$300 million (~RM1.21 billion) in Net Revenue for Sony in three years”. Or on average US$100 million a year, to oversimplify things a bit.
Now, to be clear, this is not a dig at Liu, since US$300 million is a lot of money to be made. But when taken in context of the wider PlayStation software ecosystem, it doesn’t look so rosy after all. According to Sony’s public sales data, games for the PS4 and PS5, games for the two consoles combined sold that much in a single year. Twice. Specifically, software sales for the two consoles were a total of US$303.2 million in its financial year 2021. This is later followed by a total software sale of US$303.3 million in FY 2024.
Only A Third Of Consoles’ Game Sales
Granted, there are plenty of caveats with these figures. And the immediately obvious one is that PlayStation has combined the software sales of both the PS4 and PS5 since the latter’s release. These figures also include PS VR titles, as well and games bundled with the systems. But even when looking at purely PS4 software sales from before the PS5 was released, the console made US$292.7 million in FY 2018 alone. In fact, every listed financial year has made over US$200 million. The only exception here is the strangeness that is FY 2020, which discounted the first half for whatever reason.
On one hand, it probably doesn’t cost US$100 million to port games from PlayStation to PC. But on the other, Sony probably thought the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze despite that. Sure, it can probably make the same kind of money moving forward with the existing user base of 117 million of PS4 owners including variants, as well as the 92.1 million PS5 owners plus variants. But it will probably be difficult to extend the user base of the latter considering the recent price hikes. Of course, until people act against their better judgement when when GTA 6 eventually releases.
(Source: Jerry Liu / LinkedIn, PlayStation)
