PS5 Is Selling Fewer Games But Making More Money With $70 Price Tag

Ragnarok

SSM

So far the experiment in jacking up the price of essentially all major games to $70 appears to be…working. While we can’t really look at Microsoft data thanks to so many things appearing on Game Pass (though it too has started to increase prices to $70), thanks to new Sony data we can see two things:

Sony is making record revenue from software sales.
Sony is seeing dramatic drops in actual game unit sales.

TweakTown has a really interesting deep dive into this phenomenon where they go through all the available data we have from recent earnings reveals. A main point is that while Sony had record $6.367 billion in revenue for software, overall game unit sales year over year dropped dramatically by 39 million, down to 264.2 million.

I’ve seen some people try to spin this as a negative, but I’m not sure how you can. The entire point of the price increase was ultimately to make more money, and that seems to have worked. I’m not sure decreased unit sales matter all that much when revenue is setting records regardless. This will no doubt displease players who have not especially appreciated the price increase, but it doesn’t really matter, once it happened, there was no going back.

I’ve previously argued that the price increase may be hurting individual games, even if as a whole, software sales are going up. A game like Forspoken, perhaps, seems like that in addition to middling reviews, the demand for $70 probably turned a good amount of players of who may have otherwise given it a chance. I’ve seen quite a few other games released recently that give me pause to say “that’s $70?” even if for a game like God of War Ragnarok you’re going to pay whatever it costs regardless and not really bat an eye. So that’s probably where Sony is making up the difference.

There are third party examples of this. Modern Warfare 2’s $1 billion in sales in 10 days did not actually move the total unit sales much during its launch period on PlayStation. Overall, in both first and third party categories, Sony is selling tens of millions fewer games. But making the same or more amount of money.

$70 games are here to stay. After an initial period of pushback, close to everyone is beginning to adopt the price, and they will take the hit on unit sales if it means more revenue overall. That much is clear.

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