Is console hardware struggling? In its latest financial report released Tuesday, Sony revealed that hardware sales are declining, although that doesn’t spell doom for the video game conglomerate.
Hardware sales are down year over year, from 3.3 million to 2.4 million, which finance chief Sadahiko Hayakawa attributes in part to an increase in first-party software sales and the impact of foreign exchange rates. However, those same game releases, along with increased PlayStation Plus subscriptions, meant income was up 12% for games overall. Sony also revealed that PlayStation had clocked 116 million monthly active users during June, which is the highest recorded for this time of year (even though it’s down from the 118 million from last quarter).
This is in line with what we’ve been seeing in other parts of the industry. PlayStation competitor Xbox also revealed during its financial report last week that hardware revenue was down 42% year over year. The company’s overall strategy, though, comes back to services like Xbox Game Pass and Cloud Gaming, along with first-party software releases.
Also like Xbox, the PlayStation is in the middle of its life cycle, coming up on its fourth birthday. And like with previous consoles, players are expecting mid-generation refreshes. PlayStation, for example, released a slimmer PlayStation 5 with more storage in November 2023. Overall, though, the demand for new consoles isn’t as high as it was at launch.
Mat Piscatella, a video game analyst at Circana, said something similar in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday. “Have hardware sales fallen more than expected this year? A bit, sure. But has the release slate and price discounting also been lighter than expected? A bit as well, yes.”
This has been a light year overall for first-party releases, and Sony is no exception. So far, its games include Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, MLB The Show 24, and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered. The company’s release schedule for the rest of the year includes Concord and Astro Bot, along with God of War: Ragnarok coming to PC. It’s not the most jam-packed holiday season, but PlayStation is reportedly doing well with third-party releases from other franchises.
When asked about the situation over at Sony-owned Bungie, Sony’s Hiroki Totoki reiterated what CEO Pete Parsons did in a letter announcing layoffs last week: that resources will be concentrated on developing the new extraction shooter Marathon. Bungie has also created a new team inside PlayStation Studios for an unannounced title.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.