Sony has detailed its financial results for the Christmas quarter, which reveal a healthy profit thanks in large part to huge sales of the company’s PlayStation 4 hardware.
For the three-month period ending December 31, the Japanese juggernaut recorded an 89 billion yen profit overall, up from 26.4bn yen relative to the same window of time last year. Moreover, Game and Network Services witnessed a 16.8 per cent increase year-on-year, with the report also revealing 147 million PS4 games sold during the Christmas period. This boon came as a direct result of the healthy hardware sales, with Sony noting that 6.4 million PlayStation units had been shipped across the three months.
As you’d expect, sales of the PlayStation 3 told a different story. According to the report, the last-gen system shipped a total of 1.1 million hardware units, meaning that the eight year-old console had missed its targets by a slight margin. Speaking of which, this proved to be the case for both PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV, too, resulting in a 11.2bn yen write-down.
In terms of Sony’s other divisions, we understand that Sony Pictures bore the brunt of a financial hit thanks to the debacle surrounding The Interview, while the company’s flailing PC business continues to under-perform.
Circling back to PlayStation 4, though, and last we heard lifetime sales of the console were hoovering in and around the 18 million mark, and considering that the console is set to welcome several triple-A exclusives over the coming months — The Order: 1886 and From Software’s Victorian-themed Bloodborne, for example — it shouldn’t be long before Sony’s system inches past the 20 million milestone.
