To say that PlayStation has been in a position of dominance for ages (especially where the AAA console gaming space is concerned) would be an understatement, and given the sheer strength of the brand and the lineup of first-party studios that it boasts, it’s usually quite easy to be confident in what its future is going to hold. Lately, however, things have seemed a little more shaky. 2023 was, of course, an unusually quiet year for PlayStation’s first-party output, with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 being the only major release to fit that billing, and now, in the early months of 2024, it looks like that lull is set to continue for some time to come. That has combined with other details that have come to light of late, all of which collectively has certainly raised some questions about what the internal state of the PlayStation organization is.
Let’s start with the most obvious and most recent point of discussion- that the PS5 missed its sales target in 2023’s Q4 by quite a margin. The October-December quarter is when we usually see console sales exploding pretty much every year, and the expectation was that the PS5 would enjoy such a boost in sales, not only because that’s when Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was releasing, but also because this was going to be the first Holiday season since the console came out where its sales wouldn’t be throttled by supply issues (not to mention the fact that the PS5 Slim also released in Q4). And sure enough, Sony’s own financial projections confirmed that the company was indeed expecting massive sales.
Things haven’t quite panned out that way. During its recent quarterly earnings briefing, Sony revealed that the PS5 sold 8.2 million units in Q4 of 2023- which isn’t anything to scoff at by any means, but is still well below the target that the company had set. Meanwhile, for the entirety of the fiscal year, which started on April 1, 2023 and will end on March 31, 2024, Sony had previously projected a record-breaking 25 million PS5 shipments, something that no PlayStation console has ever managed before. But with shipments for the fiscal year standing at a respectable but not earth-shattering 16.4 million units as of December 31, leaving just three months to sell an additional 8.6 million units, Sony has now revised that forecast down to a total of 21 million units, which means the company now expects 4.6 million shipments between January and March.
Now, 21 million units in a single fiscal year is still very impressive – even some of the most successful consoles of all time haven’t managed that – but even if the PS5 does manage to meet that revised forecast, it’s still ultimately not performing to the level that Sony had hoped. Rubbing salt on the wound is the fact that this is likely going to be the PS5’s peak, with Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki having said during the company’s recent earnings call that the PS5 was approaching the latter half of its life, and that Sony was, as such, expecting a gradual decline in sales for the console going forward.
Speaking of which, the plain and simple fact that the PS5 is approaching the latter half of its lifecycle, though chronologically obvious, is also one that boggles the mind. Because really, it feels like this generation has only just started. Multiple factors came together at the outset of this console generation to ensure that the transition from previous consoles to newer ones ended up dragging out much longer than anyone could have expected. 2023 was when we finally started seeing a number of major releases dropping cross-gen launches, and even now, in the fourth year of the PS5’s life, there are still many prominent games that are scheduled to also release on PS4.
The fact that so much of Sony’s own first-party output has stuck to that strategy has made cross-gen releases that much more prominent for pretty much the entirety of the PS5’s life so far. From God of War Ragnarok to Horizon Forbidden West to Gran Turismo 7 and many others, the majority of flagship first-party releases so far have all been cross-gen. In fact, at this point, more than three years on from its launch, the PS5 still really has just four major first-party exclusive games that aren’t playable on PS4- Demon’s Souls, Returnal, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (and two of these are playable on PC).
If you really wanted to stretch it, maybe you could also count the likes of Destruction AllStars, Astro’s Playroom, or The Last of Us Part 1, but all of those come with notable caveats, from being a pack-in tech demo-slash game, to being a conservative remake of a game that didn’t need one, to, in Destruction AllStars’ case, just, you know, not being very good. Now, given the fact that, putting exclusivity aside, the PS5 already has a stellar library of games, in the grand scheme of things, does it matter that there haven’t been more “true” first-party exclusives? Maybe not. But it does call into question the very existence of this console generation, and whether it needed to be brought in when it was- because clearly, the PS4 has been good enough to run the vast majority of the most notable games that have released on PS5 thus far.
To make matters worse, it’s looking like it’s going to be longer still before we see more of those premium, flagship first-party releases on PS5. PlayStation boss Hiroki Totoki recently confirmed that the company doesn’t plan on releasing any new instalments on existing major franchises until at least April 2025. Between now and then, we do have the likes of Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, Until Dawn, and Concord in the pipeline, while rumours have suggested that a new Astro Bot game could also release (not to mention the fact that Helldivers 2 just recently launched). Clearly, then, this isn’t a “dry” period for releases under the PlayStation Studios banner, given the sheer number of games coming out- but if you were hoping that PS5’s purely exclusive first-party library would finally begin ramping up with more flagship, flashy, premium big-hitters, well, it looks like we’re going to have to keep waiting for that to actually happen. By the time it does, the console will be well over four years old.
Beyond these more recent worrying developments, there have also been others over the last year or so that have made things at PlayStation seem a little fragile. The company’s live service push, for instance, has been a misguided one. Its plans to release a dozen live service titles before April 2026 always seemed overly ambitious at best, and now that those plans are already being scaled back in their infancy, questions are starting to be asked about what that means for how Sony plans to grow its first-party business. PC will likely play a larger role in that strategy going forward, so that, at least, is going to plan, but I doubt Sony’s going to be able to make live services a central part of its portfolio the way it had initially hoped.
Then there are other factors, from layoffs at first party studios (most notably Bungie) to notable titles being cancelled (like The Last of Us Online, which, incidentally, was going to be a major centerpiece in Sony’s aforementioned live service strategy). The ballooning budgets that first-party PlayStation games are being built on have also caught the eye, and for all the wrong reasons. Literally multiple hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on developing and marketing Sony’s flagship games, and frankly, the costs are getting ridiculous.
Games now need to sell an almost unreasonable amount of copies before they can even begin to make a profit, and that sort of an unsustainable model is only going to lead to bad things, sooner or later. Hell, it already has- look at all the layoffs, or the increasing prices in games, or the greater push for in-game monetization or repeat spending in live service titles. All of that at least partly arises from the plain and simple fact that games now cost way more money and take way longer to make, which means profit margins are lower, and the very act of developing a game presents a larger risk than it ever has, especially when you’re following the PlayStation model. Obviously, Sony is by no means the only company in the industry to be guilty of letting its budgets get out of control, but it certainly is one of the most prominent examples.
Let me end this by saying I’m not here to peddle doom or gloom by any stretch of the imagination. Expectations of a profit-driven business aside, it’d be silly to look at the PlayStation 5 and call it a failure by any metric. If we’re looking only at 2023’s Q4, even though Sony did not sell as many console units as it wanted to, it was still a massively profitable quarter. Zooming out, meanwhile, PS5 has sold nearly 55 million units in a little over three years, for crying out loud, and it’s almost certainly going to end up at or around the figure that the PS4 ended up landing at, which means it is inarguably and unequivocally an incredibly successful console. But is it as successful as Sony wanted it to be? Perhaps not. Combined with other factors, from ballooning budgets to the lack of proper exclusives to an underwhelming lineup of releases in the near future, the PlayStation brand seems in a shakier place right now than it has in quite some time. We can only hope that this is going to be temporary.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.