Amid a memory shortage that forced it to raise PS5 prices twice in less than a year, Sony sold just 1.5 million PS5s in its fourth fiscal quarter, down 46 percent from the year before. The company was relatively gloomy about its gaming division’s prospects next year too, forecasting that revenue would fall six percent ($1.69 billion).
Overall, Sony’s gaming division revenue was up slightly for the entire fiscal 2025 year with sales of 4.69 trillion yen ($29.9 billion) compared to 4.67 trillion yen ($29.8 billion) the previous year. Operating income was up 12 percent to 463.3 billion yen ($2.95 billion), thanks in part to an increase in PlayStation Network sales.
Some of Sony’s revenue and profit issues this year were down to impairment losses with Bungie due to Destiny 2′s poor sales. Without those charges on its back next year (plus the expected blockbuster launch of Grand Theft Auto VI in November), the company expects a 30 percent boost in profits for its next fiscal year despite the revenue drop.
Still, those forecasts will depend on its ability to obtain memory. “We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices and we
expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25,” Sony said. In its previous earnings report, the company revealed that it had secured the minimum memory it needed to accommodate sales for the 2026 holiday season.
That may be cold comfort to PS5 fans, though, considering that a standard PS5 is far from affordable at $650 after the March 2026 price hike, up $150 from just a year ago. That’s for a nearly six-year-old console that’s inexorably approaching its end of life. Nintendo was going through the same thing with its aging Switch console early last year, but the June 2025 Switch 2 launch completely changed its fortunes, becoming the fastest-selling Nintendo console ever.
