Sony misses PS5 target by a wide margin and PS Plus user numbers are down

Although Sony got off to a pretty good start with the Playstation 5 in the midst of the covid-19 crisis, it quickly became clear that it would struggle to keep up with demand, and had to adjust its forecasts accordingly. As the company now submits its financial report for the fiscal year (April 1 2021 to March 31 2022), it turns out that it didn't meet its own targets either, and missed them by quite a bit.

The report reveals that Playstation 5 stands at 19.3 million consoles sold (shipped) overall, having shipped two million consoles to stores in the last quarter. This means that Sony has sold a total of 11.5 million Playstation 5 units in its fiscal year 2021, which is over three million lower than it had anticipated (the estimate was 14.8 million consoles, although Sony recently warned that it would be hard to reach).

Unfortunately, however, this isn't the only negative news for Sony, as they've also started to lose Playstation Plus subscribers - albeit not by much. Their quarterly report shows that at the end of March 2022, there were 47.4 million subscribers to the service, down from 47.6 million subscribers in the same period last year, despite the fact that above mentioned 11.5 Playstation 5 (and a number of Playstation 4) were sold during the year.

The number of active Playstation monthly users has also fallen from 109 million to 106 million - again compared to the same period last year. However, sales of first-party games have increased, so there was something to cheer about in the report. As expected, the stock is down sharply today as a result of the news, and Sony is now going to buy back shares itself according to Bloomberg to offset the worse-than-expected results.

Thanks NeoGaf