Sony Has More Bad News If You’re Still Trying To Find A PS5

Sony, in the wake of its $3.6 billion purchase of Bungie, just had a pretty good quarterly earnings report, showing off a record year for the PlayStation brand, and yet reinforcing just how hard limited they are by current supply issues.

All the numbers look great (via BenjiSales):

• PS5 Shipped 3.9m Units of Hardware
• Lifetime Total Now 17.3m Units
• 11.3 Million Units of 1st Party Software Sold
• Digital Software Ratio 62%
• 48 Million PlayStation Plus Subscribers
• 111 Million Monthly Active PlayStation Users

Profit and revenue is also great and yet…the bad news.

PS5 is still tracking behind PS4 sales by around 3 million units due to supply shortages alone. And those shortages are only going to get worse, not better. Sony is now saying they will ship 2 million PS5s between January and March for that quarter, which is 1.3 million fewer units than they shipped in the same quarter last year.

On top of that, Sony has dropped its forecast for PS5 shipments this fiscal year to 11.5 million units from 14.8 million.

In other words, it’s going to be somehow even harder to land yourself a PS5 going forward than it was last year at this time. These shortages are not going anywhere, and even though Sony remains in front of Xbox by around 5 million units, by best estimates, it’s clear that the PS5 could have had an absolutely stratospheric launch had it not had these pandemic-related production issues where they are nowhere close to meeting demand.

This year, if you still can’t land a PS5, that may be even more frustrating with huge exclusive games like Horizon Forbidden West out in two weeks, and God of War Ragnarok supposedly out this fall. Though this also likely explains the reason Sony made sure those games would also be coming to PS4.

This is also why Sony finds themselves starting to make big, seemingly odd movies like a massive purchase of Bungie, where Bungie’s games are staying multiplatform. It seems like Sony is starting to figure out that limiting its PlayStation business so severely by tying everything to one physical box they cannot make enough of is not the best long term plan. So now we’re seeing investment for cross-platform publishing, and Sony has very much indicated they’re interested in branching out more into the PC and the cloud. These shortages only serve to reinforce why that’s probably a good idea.

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