PlayStation 4 still doing huge numbers even as replacement nears

Sony Corporation reported its fiscal year 2019 numbers in Japan late yesterday, and there’s a lot of good news all around for the PlayStation 4.

As we all know, the next generation of consoles are coming this year, and will the current gen nearing its seventh years, it’s no surprised that sales of hardware and software at this point might not always match the highs of previous years.

Even with that said, Sony’s video games division was still the most profitable of all of its segments, with $2.19 billion in profits for the year. That beats out Sony’s Imaging & Sensing Solutions division at $2.17 billion, which is nearly a billion dollars above Music in third place.

As for the PlayStation 4 itself, the system has now shipped over 110 million units. That’s an incredibly impressive number, but the thing to remember is that “shipped” means sold to stores, not customers. We do know that over 106 million PS4s were sold as of the end of 2019, so the number is definitely higher by this point.

The console currently stands—appropriately enough—as the 4th best selling gaming platform of all time, with only the GameBoy + GameBoy Color, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation 2 above it. I think the PS4 can definitely catch up to the GameBoy before all is said and done, but getting any higher than that is going to be tough, as the NDS sits at 154 million, and the PS2 over 155 million.

More impressive than hardware numbers, however, might be software. While every previous PlayStation platform only had one game that sold over 10 million copies—and every one of them was a Gran Turismo title—the PlayStation 4 now has five: The Last of Us Remastered, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man.

An impressive 245 million units of PlayStation 4 game software were sold in the past year, and what’s especially interesting about that is that 51% of it was digital sales—up from 37% the previous year.

Finally, PlayStation Plus continues to be a huge money maker for Sony, as 41.5 million people are currently subscribed to the service, as opposed to 36.4 million the previous year.

Source: Sony FY2019 Consolidated Financial Results
Source: Sony Supplemental Information for the Consolidated Financial Results

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