In its latest financial report that ended on September 30, 2024, Sony is reporting that sales for its Game and Network Services division went up 12% year-on-year, to about $7 billion. According to Sony, this increase was primarily due to third-party game sales and mentioned a news sports title,  “a new sports title”, likely EA Sports FC 25, and “an action RPG title from China”, likely Black Myth: Wukong. In its latest financial call, Sony Management discussed some of its failings with trying to start their on Live Service initiative, specifically what went wrong with Concord, and shared its plans for the immediate future.

Operating income went up 184% to about $900 million. This is a new record high and as a result, raised its sales revenue forecast by 4% for the current fiscal year, which ends in April 2025. 3.8 million PS5 consoles were shipped during this time which is 29% down compared to the same period last year.

As of now, a total of 65. 5 million PlayStation 5 units have been sold bringing it a few million units behind the PS4 was during the same period of its lifespan (67.5 million shipped.)

Sony’s Network services revenue – hich encompasses PS Plus and advertising revenue – increased 18% year-on-year, which Sony said was primarily due to the shift to higher tiers of service and price increases. Monthly active users across all platforms in September increased 8% compared  to the same month last year, which is its eighth consecutive quarter of growth. Total playtime also increased 14% compared to the same month last year.

In the latest Q&A session, Sony President, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki talked about the live service intitative and the lessons learned from Concord. 

“Currently, we are still in the process of learning,” he said via an interpreter. “And basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it.

So for us, for our reflection, we probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.

Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.

And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches. That’s all I have.”

Sony management said their plan for the medium term will focus on a mix of single-player and live service games.

“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period, that combines single-player games, which are our strength and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP, with live service games that pursue upside, while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”