Sony Is Still Figuring Out the PS6 as PS5 Sales Slow and Bungie Weighs on the Bottom Line

Sony has released its yearly financial reports, and along with it, a flood of information on PS5 sales, future plans, the Bungie purchase, and more.

Perhaps the most significant detail, however, is that the company hasn’t yet decided when the PlayStation 6 will launch or how much it will cost. And this comes after Sony just recently gave the PS5 a price hike. With that, though, Sony said it expects income to be flat year-on-year due to “an increase in investments for the next-generation platform.”

During an investor Q&A, as reported by VGC, CEO Hiroki Totoki was asked if the increase in components like RAM had affected the PS5 and would affect the PS6. Totoki said that as the price of memory increases, it would naturally affect the BOM (Bill of Materials), potentially having a big impact on Sony. He also notes, component situation is the major reason the date and price of the PS6 have yet to be decided.

“We have not yet decided on at what timing we will launch the new console, or at what prices. So we would like to really observe and follow the situation,” Totoki said, “Looking at the current circumstances, the memory price is also expected to be very high FY 2027, because there will still be a shortage of supply. So under that assumption, we must think carefully what we will do.”

Alongside details on PS5, Sony shared that revenue from consoles and other gaming hardware has dropped significantly, falling by 16.6% to 944.4 billion yen ($6.02 billion), with PS5 sales slowing by 11%, bringing the total to 93.7 million units. However, PlayStation still surpassed other Sony divisions in revenue, largely due to game sales, bringing in 2.64 trillion yen ($16.8 billion), a 5.3% increase over the previous year.

The other notable addition of the financials was an “impairment loss” of $765 million due ot the underperformance of Marathon from Bungie. Sony purchased Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, and since then, Bungie has struggled to achieve success with both Destiny 2 and Marathon.

However, it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean both games are catastrophic failures; it means Bungie has yet to meet the value assigned to the purchase.

During that same Q&A, Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao noted that the company plans to stick with Marathon, saying

“Player reception to Marathon is strong, with the game receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level. Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience and expansion of the user base.”