PS5 Sales Fall Short of Estimates; Sony Confirms No Major Franchise Release in Next Fiscal Year

14.02.2024 - 12:18 / wccftech.com / Alessio Palumbo / Sony

During its Q3 2023 earnings release, Sony updated investors on the new PS5 sales milestone. Just in December, it had announced 50 million units sold. The latest PlayStation console has now reached 54.8 million units sold since its November 2020 launch, having sold 8.2 million units in the last quarter.

This is a sizable increase over Q3 2022's 7.1 million units; however, Sony had an incredibly ambitious target of 25 million PS5 units sold throughout its fiscal year 2023, and it has now been forced to revise this forecast downward to 21 million units. The new forecast also consequently predicts a 5% downward revision for the full-year revenue.

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Moreover, Sony revealed there won't be any major franchise PS5 games released in the next fiscal year (from April 2024 to March 2025). The company is likely referring to first-party releases only. On that note, it's not much of a surprise, as most of their internal studios are likely too early in development to launch something within a year or so.

Naughty Dog has recently canceled The Last of Us Online, which should have been their next release. While Neil Druckmann confirmed a new project is in development, it'll likely take a few years still to materialize. Guerrilla Games launched Horizon Forbidden West in 2022 and its DLC, Burning Shores, last year. The company has announced Horizon Online, but again, it's too early.

Housemarque launched Returnal in 2021, while Sony Santa Monica released God of War Ragnarok last year. Insomniac Games just released Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (which, by the way, has just passed the 10 million sales milestone, with franchise sales up to 50 million). Bend Studio is working on a new IP, while Polyphony is still very busy updating GT7. As far as big PS5 sequels, Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima 2 might have been the one (the first installment launched in July 2020), but it's clearly not ready yet.

Of course, that doesn't mean no first-party PS5 games will be released in Sony's fiscal year 2024. The company was just commenting on big existing franchises. New IPs could still launch within that timeframe. Haven's Fairgame$ and Firewalk's Concord are two such candidates.

Moreover, Sony said they anticipate a gradual reduction in PS5 hardware sales for the next fiscal year as the hardware enters the 'latter half' of its life cycle. A drastic price cut likely isn't coming, by the way, as Sony has much less room to reduce production costs compared to the PlayStation 4.