Today, Sony has released a new end of year financial report that shares that the PlayStation 4 has sold 96.8 million units worldwide. The report shares statistics from Q4 which is January 1- March 31, 2019. Sony also revealed some news regarding the release of the PlayStation 5.

Contributing to the 98.6 million units sold was 17.8 million PS4 consoles sold in the financial year of 2018. 2.6 million of the sales took place during the fourth quarter of the year.

While this is good news for Sony, that number is lower than the previous year, 1.2 million to be exact. Sony did say that it is .03 million higher than their original projections in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Sony says that they expect the decline to continue into the new financial year. Sony estimates that they will sell 16 million consoles in the new financial year. Despite the decline, Sony expects game sales to increase.

Games sales in 2018 for Sony went up 19% from the previous year. Sony has reported that games sales accounted for $20.7 billion. The software sales for Q4 was 54.7 million which is a 2.7 million increase from last year. 45% of the sales were digital which is up from the previous year of 43%.

The increase in game sales for Sony was also because of an increase in PlayStation Plus subscribers which went up 2.2 million for a total of 36.4 million.

Sony has also said that they expect a decrease in operating income due to the shift in focus to the PlayStation 5 which was finally detailed earlier this month. Because of this, Sony has said that they expect the PlayStation 5 will not launch before April 2020. This is what was reported by The Wall Street Journal:

Sony:
-No next-gen PlayStation launch over next 12 months
-PS Now has been ave. 40% annual growth since launch, now 700,000 users
-Much of Y31.1 billion (difference between past fy op vs this fy op outlook) to be invested to develop next PlayStation console

— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) April 26, 2019