PS3 Sales Up 118% Year On Year

TSA Staff 38 Comments

As expected, Sony’s consolidated results for the first quarter of the fiscal year (ending March 31,2011) show the company has made a considerable profit.

The announcement (available here as a PDF and sourced via GAF) shows an operating income of $753 million with a net income of $289 million.

Worldwide unit sales show that the PS3 shifted 2.4 million units this quarter, compared with 1.1 last year.  The PSP was down, though, moving 1.2 million units compared with 1.3 last year, with the PS2 remaining the same at 1.6 million units.

In terms of software, the figures are encouraging: the PS3’s game sales are up from 14.8 million to 24.8 million units, the PSP’s up from 8.3 to 9.2 million units.  As you’d expect, the PS2’s game sales are down, from 8.5 million units to 3.4 million.

This puts the total number of PS3s sold at 38.1 million (just 3 million or so behind the Xbox 360 now) with 15 million forecasted by Sony for 2010. Total game sales are at 315.3 million units.

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38 Comments

  1. It always shocks me how the PS2 does better than even the PSP.

    • Yeah I was just thinking the same thing – who is still buying the PS2?! I wonder if people will still be buying the PS3 in 10 years time? It must be making Sony money though, otherwise they would surely have ‘done a Microsoft’ and killed it by now, essentially giving people no option but to buy the latest model…

      Still you can’t argue with a 118% sales increase…

      • I think the lack of PS2 emulation in the PS3 keeps the old PS2 going. Can’t see any other reason.

  2. i love good news about Sony :)

  3. Hmm.. impressive.
    I wonder if the Move will increase the unit sales even further.

    • I think it will, but so will Kinect for Xbox, so it will be a close finish between Sony and Microsoft by the end of the year

      • I think it will be very interesting.
        I believe that Move has struck a chord with the existing customer base and will sell well toexisting owners, but the Xbox’s controller-free controller will sell more (initially) to non-360 owners & may help shift more consoles. (At least until Move developers get someof the tech shown in the tech demos into move games and stop making HD Wii-like games)

      • I think that’s an accurate observation. Move will be the more successful controller IMO, but Kinect will sucker more people into buying a 360 for the first time for the Christmas day novelty factor (hence the 4GB bundle but no 250GB bundle). Especially given the fact MS will no doubt spend millions to show it in all it’s mocked-up faux-family glory during every single ad break from November onwards…

      • I can’t help feel that Kinect could be another dust gatherer (like the Wii in many, many households I know).

    • GT5 just before christmas which i’m assuming will end up as a bundle and should boost ps3 sales.

  4. I’m glad to hear that things are still on the up for Sony, it was horrible seeing the stories about them hemorrhaging money on a system they’d already spent so much on in R & D.

  5. Re: Xbox sales, they’re up to around 45m now last I heard (unless those figs weren’t correct), meaning that initial gap is broadly speaking still there.

    Good turnaround for Sony, it’s been a long haul back to profitability.

    With year on year sales I alway look back to what was happening a year ago, and I see the old phat console & recall everyone saying it was in need of a pricecut, so with this in mind it’s no surprise year on year sales are up. Also last year we had Killzone 2 early on whereas this year we’ve had MAG, Heavy Rain God Of War 3, MNR etc so this will of course help year on year console & software sales.

    But, it’s great that Sony are now making profit on these sales and for the 1st time in over 3 years, more sales doesn’t equal more losses

    • The gap may still be there, but how many 360 sales have been generated by RROD? How many people purchased a new on after the initial denials that there is a problem?
      I know a couple of Xbox fans that have bought 5 each because of the RROD.
      Then again, how many people have had problems with YLOD?

      • This is a good point actually, it hadn’t occurred to me to factor in replacements. It would be nice to see how this affects things.

      • Of course, but cancelling replacements on both sides is an unknown figure… I’ve bought 3 PS3s but I only own one, and discounting the number of PS3’s sold because for a long time it represented the best value Blu-ray player… So the only thing we can do without relying on anecdotal evidence is look at the headline figures unless either company comes out with an active user list, which they won’t

      • I’m dying to know to be fair. Does the 45 million 360s include the RRODs? If so, the figure is terrible for comparison. Not having a go, not inciting a riot. Just curious.

        Whilst in Staples last night, I was buying a box to send my PS3 off for repair. The lad helping me was unaware of the YLOD (which was fair enough as he didn’t have a PS3) but I mentioned how it was similar to the RROD. He blurted out “don’t get me started on RROD… I’m on my tenth Xbox. Six of them before MS apologised in such a manner that they gave him an Elite version instead. I’ve gone through three of those too”.

        Seriously. Christ!

      • ummm… see above comment “Of course, but cancelling replacements on both sides is an unknown figure… I’ve bought 3 PS3s but I only own one”

        anecdotal evidence is meaningless especially as MSs 3 year exchange program would have lessened the sales impact from the horrendous RRoD figures we can all recall anecdotally

      • I did, in fact, read your reply but I was curious about the weighting such figures would lend to the real-world user-base of any given console. That’s all. Even if the PS3 was on 10% failure for YLOD it would still be a drop in the ocean to the much-touted 35 to 40% RROD problem of the older 360s. Anyway, the figures don’t exist so I shall now shut up.

      • Not all, but a large portion of RRoDs have been taken care of thanks to the 3 year warranty therefore wouldn’t positively impact sales figures in the way their horrendous failure rates suggest it would.

      • a mate of mine is on his SEVENTH Xbox due to failures..

      • When you get past 2 or 3 xbox’s isn’t that enough to notice the PS3?

      • I can beat that tuffcub, I’m (or more accurately me and my brother, so we’re) on our 14th xbox 360. We’ve got 3 ps3’s including a 60gb, that have never broken, and they along with the 360’s get around the same usage. It’s mad. We get through one every couple of months…

      • I had 9 360’s before binning it off and getting a PS3.

        I’ve owned 2 PS3’s but only because I upgraded to a slim from 80GB fat. It was still working perfectly when I traded it in.
        I don’t really know why I bothered with Xbox, I never really had much luck or fun with it.

    • GT5 will tip the scale and the 360s year head start will have amounted to nothing….

      The Hare and The Tortoise kinda springs to mind….

      • or the sleeping dragon and jumped up american

  6. my ps1,2,3 and psp are all happy to hear the positive news!

    I love my Playstations!! Can you tell?

    • Then why do you keep cheating on them with younger models

  7. great news for Sony, all I know is that I love my little black box under my telly. Amazing quality and excellent product for the price.

  8. Seems the 360’s head start did them no good inevitably… good :)

  9. Just for comparison, looks like nintendo are suffering more than usual…
    http://www.next-gen.biz/news/nintendo-posts-%C2%A3184-million-q1-loss

    • Yep, they’ve had a stagnant 09/10, but 10/11 is shaping up to a return to the norm

  10. Even though Sony are doing well I can’t see them coming out on top of the 360 as many have predicted for the past few years.

    I wonder whether Sony can bring back the 360 crowd next generation, the first two years of this one did a lot of damage to them and some people I know still mock the PS3 as being pure rubbish.

    • Interesting point actually.

      I think there is now a pool of core gamers that will now buy whatever Microsoft produce – there is a certain element of lock-in provided by Live, also the bang-per-buck was right on the money all the way from the start whereas the PS3 didn’t really get going outside of Sony early adopters until the Slim & pricedrop.

      then there’s other ways to access gaming these days, like Facebook & mobile phone gaming is pretty great now… The core consoles could be fighting over a slice of an ever shrinking pie

    • You should tell those people I have a 360 which only use is to stop paper from blowing off my desk, and is an ugly at that, apart from when some electricity flows through it and give a nice lights display in Red.

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