PS5 Disc Model No Longer Being Sold At Loss

Sony CFO Hiro­ki Toto­ki con­firmed dur­ing the com­pa­ny’s earn­ings brief­ing on Wednes­day, that the disc-based edi­tion of the PlaySta­tion 5 is no longer being sold at a loss.

Accord­ing to Bloomberg, the $400 dig­i­tal edi­tion is still being sold for a loss though, but this is off­set by more mar­gin-rich hard­ware like periph­er­als and the PS4. Although the PS4 has most­ly run its course in the gam­ing world, it man­aged to ship anoth­er 500,000 units dur­ing the April-June period.

Mean­while, Sony’s video game divi­sion post­ed an over­all 2% increase in sales. How­ev­er, total oper­at­ing prof­it took a dive dur­ing the last quar­ter due to a decrease in sales of non-first-par­ty games and DLC. This was also attrib­uted to loss­es from the PS5. Sony said it was tak­ing a loss on the con­sole due to “strate­gic price points” which helped to move more units.

Los­ing mon­ey on gam­ing sys­tems is com­mon dur­ing the start of a new con­sole’s life­cy­cle, but it’s not true for every one. Nin­ten­do’s extreme­ly pop­u­lar Switch con­sole was sold at a prof­it from the begin­ning. Microsoft has yet to offer specifics about the prof­it mar­gins of its new Xbox consoles. 

Sony’s earn­ings report also brought details about PS5 ship­ment fig­ures and PlaySta­tion Plus sub­srip­tion num­bers. The com­pa­ny also stat­ed it has secured enough com­po­nents to reach its PS5 sales goals. Addi­tion­al­ly, PlaySta­tion Now is steadi­ly growing.