Sony has released its financials for the 2023-24 fiscal year, and the PlayStation division of the business has had a pretty strong twelve months, driving over a third of the company's overall sales.
According to Sony's results presentation, the Game & Network Services arm of the business, which is essentially PlayStation and its associated studios, generated 4.268 trillion yen in sales (around $27 billion).
Per the company's accompanying speech transcript, that figure constitutes 20.8 million PlayStation 5 unit sales, as well as 12 million sales for Helldivers 2 across twelve weeks, which puts the third-person shooter ahead of God of War Ragnarok for the same period.
Helldivers 2 has also apparently been Sony's "biggest PC hit title to date". Remember that the recent Helldivers 2 controversy surrounding the need to have a PlayStation ID to play on PC won't factor into this report given the timing.
Going forward, Sony says it expects PS5 unit sales to "gradually decline" given that the console is entering the second half of its life cycle. As such, Sony's expectation is that it will sell around 18 million PS5s this year.
Despite this predicted downturn in sales, Sony thinks it'll be able to "steadily increase sales and profits" from the PlayStation platform by building a stronger active user base and increasing user engagement.
As such, although gaming sales are predicted to drop to around 4.2 trillion yen next year, Sony expects profits in the sector to jump by around 20%.
Across the next three financial years, Sony's plan for its PlayStation division has been given the name "Console & Beyond", likely because of the increasing number of PlayStation releases making their way to PC in recent months.
The company says its plan for gaming is to drive profit by expanding its PlayStation install base, "providing richer gaming experiences", and focusing on PC releases, as well as "enhancing" its first-party software offerings.
These financial results come after Sony Interactive Entertainment laid off almost a thousand employees around the world earlier this year, including staffers at studios like Insomniac, Naughty Dog, and Guerrilla.
Of course, that hasn't stopped Sony as a whole engaging in a share buyback scheme to massively boost its payout to shareholders this financial year, but then the PlayStation owner is hardly unique in that endeavor.
