Sony’s Q2 financial results for fiscal year 2020 are in, revealing that as of September 30, 2020, the hardware manufacturer has shipped 113.8 million PS4 units globally. During the three month period that concluded on September 30th, approximately 1.5 million PS4s were shipped worldwide. This is down considerably from the 2.8 million shipped during the same period last year.
Given the imminence of Sony’s next-gen hardware, such a decrease in overall sales does not come as much of a surprise. The company’s gaming division is seeing increases in other avenues, though. Sony’s financial results further disclose that numbers for PS Plus subscribers continue to rise. By September 30th, the service raked in a total of 45.9 million members, which is up from the 36.9 million reported in the same time frame for the previous fiscal year.
PS4 software sales experienced quite the year-over-year uptick, too. At the end of Q2 FY2020, a whopping 80.9 million units had been sold through to customers. This is a drastic increase from the 70.6 million software sales in Q2 FY2019. Interestingly, of those 80.9 million games sold, 12.4 million were from first-party studios–the same period last fiscal year saw first-party software sales total 6.3 million units. No doubt the successes of The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima contributed to Sony nearly doubling its first-party software sales this time around.
Considering the state of things, it’s also no surprise that digital sales continue to outpace those of the physical variety. In Q2 FY2019, 45 percent of PlayStation 4 game sales were digital. That figure increased to 59 percent digital sales during this fiscal year’s second quarter. It’ll be interesting to see how digital software fares in Q3, especially since Sony will soon simultaneously release digital-only and disc-based SKUs of PlayStation 5.
