A recent profit breakdown for Sony’s games and network services have shown what proportions of Sony’s revenue are the most and least successful. Most evident among the Sony profit breakdown, however, is the great prominence of add-on content, such as microtransactions and DLC. The next biggest, though significantly smaller, is console sales.
It’s not surprising that microtransactions are such a big money-maker, either. Many games and companies that are heavily into microtransactions report billions of dollars’ worth of revenue from people that buy them, making in-game purchases and buying DLC. So it stands to reason that of course it would be the biggest piece of the pie-graph.
Alongside microtransactions and DLC, and console sales, other net sales for the past fiscal year include full game packaged software, full game digital software (physical and digital copies of games), network services such as PS Plus and PS Now, and various other peripherals like Playstation VR.
With the Sony profit breakdown showing that a full third of last fiscal year’s revenue came from add-ons, DLC, and microtransactions, we’ll likely see that trend continuing into the foreseeable future, even with the various criticisms of microtransactions that have been happening recently.
It’s likely that at the same time, the reason for console sales being so low is due to the pandemic, where low numbers of Playstation 5 consoles have contributed to low sales, even if 10 million of them have been sold so far. Games also have been slow in coming out for similar reasons, which might also be why they occupy only a rough fourth of the chart.
Whether next fiscal year’s Sony profit breakdown will be changed so that another aspect is in the lead ahead of DLC and microtransactions remains to be seen. Many highly-anticipated games are slated to come out this year and in 2022, so if enough popular games come out, and the number of available Playstation 5 consoles rises, there might be quite the shift.
