The PlayStation 5, which has been fueling the video game industry for years, is losing steam with gamers.
Sony has lowered its sales forecast for the console for fiscal 2023, now saying it expects to sell 21 million units. That’s 16% lower than its last forecast of 25 million.
Should it hit that target, it will still be an improvement over fiscal 2022, when the company sold 19.1 million PS5s, but the reduced target signals both overly ambitious goals and a wider slowdown in the video game market.
The PS5 is far and away the console sales leader this generation. Microsoft stopped giving sales data about its Xbox years ago, but data extrapolated from Take-Two Interactive Software’s most recent earnings indicates the company has sold 27 million Xbox Series X and Series S to date.
Holiday sales of the PS5 were weaker than expected, even with seasonal price cuts and promotions. In addition, Sony said, the company does not expect to release any major first party titles before March of 2025. Software drives hardware sales in the video game industry and the drought of big titles such as God of War or Marvel’s Spider-Man will have an impact.
The industry’s biggest third-party title, the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI, has also seen delays and been pushed into Take-Two’s fiscal 2025.
The industry is also entering the back half of this generation of consoles. The most passionate gamers, for the most part, already own a PS5 or Xbox Series X/S and now the makers of those machines have to target a less enthusiastic mainstream audience. Eventually, that typically means deeper price cuts, though analysts haven’t forecast any such actions in the near future. (They would be more likely to come closer to the holiday period.)
Not all the news was discouraging from Sony. Spider-Man 2 has sold 10 million copies, and the number of monthly active users on its PlayStation Network was up from 107 million to 123 million.