The PlayStation Has Made The Majority Of Sony’s Profits So Far This Year

Sony didn’t have a great start to its fiscal 2016. Their overall financials are down 10% year over year to $15 billion. Profits were down 42% to $546 million. But there is one bright spot for the company: The PlayStation, which is such a powerhouse it was singlehandedly responsible for most of those profits in the first place.

VentureBeat has a breakout of Sony’s first fiscal quarter and it’s fairly jaw-dropping. The PlayStation’s revenues are up 14% from last year, to $3.2 billion between April and June. And it brought in $427 million in profit, which is a 126% increase year over year. In other words, while everything else is plateauing or struggling, the PlayStation has been out there bringing home the financial bacon.

What’s especially interesting is that the PlayStation isn’t moving hardware particularly quickly. Instead, the majority of the profit has been coming from games purchased via the PlayStation store and software sold to play on the PlayStation 4. In of itself, it answers a few questions about how the NPD numbers can be so consistently bad and yet developers and publishers aren’t panicking. But it also raises a few interesting questions. We don’t know exactly how many games and movies Sony moved through their online store, but they certainly got a cut of each one. The question is, how big is the cut, and is profit going up because of volume, the share of the game’s price they take, or both?

(Via VentureBeat)

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