MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Following on from yesterday’s tweeted highlights from Sony’s Investor Day, today we got the full details from the event in PDF form. The key take home being that Sony, as with many publishers, is counting the users and not the units.
The most interesting slide showed the platform lifecycle of PlayStation consoles to date, showing the operating profit of the division all the way back to the original PlayStation launch, with the years of the PlayStation 3 being particularly painful looking.
Sony’s key strategy is soften the platform-transition bump from previous years by improving recurring revenue from services such as PlayStation Plus. Though it’s still predicting that this will reduce operating profit down to ¥130-170bn (£880m to £1.16bn) in 2020 as it "crouches down" before the hardware refresh.
To that end the company will be looking to boost operating income in FY2018 to ¥190bn (£1.29bn) from ¥177.5bn (£1.21bn) in FY2017. It will achieves that growth via software sales and network services. The company is targeting a nice round 100m monthly active users.
There was also a roundup of headline numbers. Sony reiterated that it has sold 79m PS4 units (to Mar 31st 2018) and has over 80m monthly active users on its PlayStation Network. And they played 800m hours week in the final week of December 2017. Largely playing, we presume, one of the 246m games the company sold during its FY2017. All the while growing PlayStation Plus subscribers to 34.2m.
