The number of PlayStation games sold in FY 2022 fell 13% in just one year.
Sony has maintained its dominant position in the console gaming business by generating record profits from PlayStation sales. Fans purchased over $6.3 billion of PlayStation software across digital and physical formats in the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2022. Even still, overall game sales have plummeted dramatically. But there was a 13% drop in sales of PlayStation game titles for the PS4 and PS5 for the fiscal year 2022, as reported by the Japanese gaming giant.
While the overall revenue from the video games industry has experienced a 22% drop over the past two years, PlayStation gamers are spending more money on fewer games, according to Sony’s financial report for fiscal year 2022. That is expected, as $70 has become the new standard for PlayStation 5 games.
In the 2018 fiscal year, overall sales of games produced by Sony came in at 292.7 million units, as stated by the company’s official statistics. But following a decline in sales to 276.1 million in the following fiscal year, game sales exploded in the following year and reached a record high of 338.9 million in the following fiscal year. Despite this, the overall sales of the PlayStation game, however, have been on the decline since then.
Sales of PS4 and PS5 games totaled 303.2 million in FY 2021, down 35 million from the previous year. The downward spiral continued into the next fiscal year (2022), with overall game sales plummeting to 264.2 million units, representing a significant decline of 22% in just two years. The percentage of digital downloads to retail sales for PlayStation games hovered around 70% last year.
Not only have game sales dropped, but so too have Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription program users. The business had a major revamp in June of last year when it shifted focus from selling access to online gaming. While it retains the PS Plus name, Sony’s service has evolved into a multi-tiered service similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass.
PS Plus Essential is the rebranded version of the original service, while PS Plus Extra and PS Plus Premium are paid upgrades that include additional features and access to downloadable and streamable content formerly available only through PlayStation Now. In spite of the rebranding and relaunch, PS Plus had a loss of 600,000 subscriptions, bringing the overall number of users down from an all-time high of 47.4 million in December 2021 to 47.4 million in March.
The number of copies sold of third-party games fell by 38.6 million compared to the previous year. According to the company’s earnings report, most of Sony’s game sales decline was attributed to third-party titles. Sony’s fiscal year ending in 2022, the business sold 43.5 million copies of PlayStation-exclusive first-party games for the PS4 and PS5.
This slightly decreased from the previous fiscal year’s 43.9 million copies. On the other side, third-party game sales were down by 38.6 million, a decrease of about 15 percent from the previous year. The sales figures for third-party games dropped dramatically from the previous year’s 259.3 million copies to 220.7 million in the fiscal year 2022.
Sony is probably looking for a breakthrough with the probable PlayStation Showcase 2023 next week, and two of their upcoming exclusives, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, can make a lot of difference.
