Sony game sales up 10 percent, loss more than halved
updated 04:45 pm EDT, Wed October 29, 2008
Sony game sales up 10%
Sony on Wednesday announced its second-quarter fiscal results, ending on September 30, revealing an upward trend in the company's video game operations. While the giant company was down overall by 0.5 percent from the same time period in 2007, its gaming division showed a positive trend upwards. Overall sales were up by more than 10 percent and the arm's quarterly loss was halved to $379 million. The disproportionate change can be partly attributed to the decreasing costs involved in making the PlayStation 3 gaming console as production and sales volumes go up.
In the first half of the year, PS3 sales from last year have increased by over one million units, to 2.43 million, while sales of the older system, the PlayStation 2, have dropped by about 800,000, now at about 2.5 million. The PS2 has been around long enough to likely be profitable for the company, but progress in the industry means it's slowly getting outdated. A similar pattern is seen in software sales for the two systems: PS2 game titles dropped by 15 million, now at 23 million, and PS3 software rose by 11 million, totaling 21 million sales.
The company's PlayStation Portable gaming system, a new version of which was released this summer, fared slightly worse than the PS3, with hardware sales jumping somewhat, now at 3.18 million sales, while software sales suffered a very slight drop, coming in at 12 million.
A boost in software sales is expected from new and upcoming titles for the consoles, including sequels to traditionally popular games, such as shooters Resistance 2 and Killzone 2, along with the recently released LittleBigPlanet. [via ArsTechnica]
