Bungie's setbacks resulted in a $766 million write-off — key points from Sony's annual report
The Sony Corporation released its report for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2026. Below are the key metrics of the gaming division.
Marathon
- PlayStation surpassed other Sony divisions in revenue. It alone earned 4.68 trillion yen ($29.8 billion) for the year, accounting for 37.5% of the corporation's total revenue. However, compared to the previous year, PlayStation's revenue grew only marginally, by just 0.3%.
- Game sales brought in the most money for PlayStation, totaling 2.64 trillion yen ($16.8 billion), which is 5.3% more than the previous year. Of this amount, 51.5% came from DLCs, microtransactions, and other in-game purchases.
- Revenue from console and other gaming hardware sales significantly dropped. It fell by 16.6% to 944.4 billion yen ($6.02 billion).
- Revenue from gaming services amounted to 763.1 billion yen ($4.87 billion), increasing by 13.9% year-over-year. This includes income from PlayStation Network, PlayStation Plus, and advertising.
- Studio Bungie did not perform well over the past year. As a result, Sony had to write down part of its assets twice. Initially, in the second quarter, they wrote down 31.5 billion yen ($201 million), and then in the fourth quarter, they wrote down an additional 88.6 billion yen ($565 million).
- Additionally, throughout the year, Sony wrote down 18.3 billion yen ($117 million) in capitalized development costs.
- According to Sony, without these write-downs, PlayStation's annual operating profit would have reached a record level. Nevertheless, it still managed to grow by 11.7% to 463.3 billion yen ($2.95 billion).
- During the year, Sony sold 16 million PlayStation 5 consoles (-11%), bringing total console sales to 93.7 million units.
- Annual game sales for PlayStation 4 and 5 amounted to 317.9 million copies (+4.8%), of which 32.1 million copies were Sony's own games.
- As of March 31, the PlayStation Network service had 125 million monthly active users, which is 1 million more year-over-year, but 8 million less compared to the previous quarter.