The CEO of Sony has admitted the company is focused on monetising current PlayStation 5 owners than from new ones and one analyst has shared data showing why this is the case.
There’s no arguing that the PlayStation 5 has been a success for Sony, having crossed the 95 million sales mark in June. Reputationally, though, Sony and the PlayStation brand have been taking quite the beating in the past few years.
While a lot of the current furore is to do with Sony’s plans to abandon physical games, the company was already getting flack for its slim release schedules, its obsession with live service games, its decision to stop PC ports, and simply coming across like it isn’t putting any effort into trying to please its core audience.
Sony itself has since admitted that it doesn’t feel the need to ‘aggressively sell’ the PlayStation 5 at the moment and that’s because the company is making far more money off the PlayStation 5 audience than on the PlayStation 4.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki stated that since the PlayStation 5 is in the latter half of its lifecycle, Sony doesn’t need to focus so much on marketing the console to new customers and can instead prioritise ‘recurring revenue from the current user base.’
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Thanks to some number crunching by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, you can see why Sony is taking this approach. Between 2018, which was in the midst of the PlayStation 4 era, and 2025, Sony’s average annual revenue per PlayStation active user has increased from 23,580 yen to 37,485 yen.
According to Ahmad, that’s an increase of 59%, albeit one that was boosted by the coronavirus induced lockdown. He also shared a second chart that shows annual revenue has consistently increased for PlayStation Plus subscriptions, digital games, and DLC/microtransactions since 2021… but not for physical games.
I did the math on this and average annual revenue per PlayStation active user has grown from 23,580 Yen in FY2018 to 37,485 Yen in FY2025, which is around $230. An increase of 59% over that period. Although growth was flat over the past year or two. https://t.co/sfbWHRAy6p pic.twitter.com/nIFw8tsCs2
Growth has been flat for the last couple of years, but these statistics do help provide context for Sony’s actions. If the company is making more than twice as much money from the PlayStation 5 audience than it did from the PlayStation 4 audience, even with a smaller number of exclusives, then why not prioritise milking as much as it can from that audience through subscriptions and microtransactions?
It also makes sense for Sony to focus on the current audience when the PlayStation 5 is now far more expensive than it was at launch and thus a harder sell to new customers. Although the PlayStation 5 Pro, which costs a whopping £789.99, is almost sold out in the UK, no doubt thanks to the upcoming GTA 6.
The fact that revenue from physical games has been so low compared to digital games also re-emphasises why Sony feels comfortable ditching them and why it’s being rather haughty about the whole thing.
Just recently, Sony made the galling suggestion that you can’t own digital games because there’s only ever one copy and that it’s always been obvious that it’s only ever been licensing (or renting) digital games to customers.
Sadly, Sony can get away with this sort of arrogance as it has no real competition thanks to Microsoft dropping the ball so hard this generation that it felt the need to start porting its own to exclusives to PlayStation… though they are starting to run that back a bit starting with Gears Of War: E-Day.
All this said, though, Sony could find itself in trouble once it needs to start pushing the PlayStation 6. There’s very little official info about it, but there’s barely any enthusiasm for the hardware when it’s expected to not be any more powerful than the PlayStation 5 and be too expensive for most people to afford.
