Amid a memory shortage that forced it to raise PS5 prices twice in less than a year, Sony sold just 1.5 million PS5s during its fiscal fourth quarter, a 46% drop from the previous year. The company was also relatively gloomy about its gaming division’s outlook for next year, forecasting that revenue would fall 6 percent ($1.69 billion).
Overall, Sony’s gaming division’s revenue rose slightly for the full fiscal year 2025, with sales of 4.69 trillion yen ($29.9 billion) compared to 4.67 trillion yen ($29.8 billion) the previous year. Operating profit rose 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 due to value losses with Bungie due to Destiny 2′s poor sales. Without these fees to pay next year (plus the expected blockbuster launch of Grand Theft Auto VI in November), the company expects a 30 percent increase in profits for its next fiscal year despite the drop in revenue.
However, these predictions will depend on its ability to obtain memory. “We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the amount of memory we can source at reasonable prices and we
“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 keep up with sales for the 2026 holiday season.
That may be little comfort to PS5 fans, however, given that a standard PS5 is far from affordable at $650 after the March 2026 price hike, a $150 hike from just a year ago. This is a console that is almost six years old and is inexorably approaching the end of its life. Nintendo was going through the same thing with its aging Switch console early last year, but the launch of the Switch 2 in June 2025 completely changed its fortunes, becoming the best-selling Nintendo console of all time.