It’s sure that PlayStation 4 is off to a strong start, with 7 million unit already sold in just over 6 months, and recently Sony claimed PS4 to be “already contributing profit” unlike the previous consoles.
Speaking at a corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kaz Hirai said that the PS4 is well on track to eventually overtake the 155 million sales of PlayStation 2, the company’s all-time best-selling console.
“It is likely that PS4 will become the platform which exceeds the profits earned with PS2,” said Hirai, noting strong hardware sales and growing popularity of digital services, to be the key to PS4’s financial performance.
Hirai pointed out the amount of losses the company went through during the first few years of PS3, which reportedly was a loss of hundreds of dollars per console sold.
Sony’s PS2 launched in 2000, had more than significant hardware sales with no digital downloads to recoup, which continued for several years even after the launch of PS3 in 2006. It took more than 4 years for Sony to break even or recoup with digital downloads.
“From a profitability perspective, PS4 is also already contributing profit on a hardware unit basis, establishing a very different business framework from that of previous platform businesses,” said Hirai, reports Impress Watch.
Sales for the company’s game division were up 38.5 percent during the last financial year, but Sony reported an operating loss of $78m due to the costs associated with the launch of the PS4.
Despite the companywide losses in the latest financial report, Sony estimates home console sales of 17 million units in this financial year, 2.4 million units up from the 14.6 million home consoles sold in the 2013.
