Helldivers 2 breaks records with 12 million copies sold in 3 months, Sony announces in its FY23 report

Sony has released its financial report for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024. Let’s dive into the company’s gaming revenue and console sales, as well as the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 breaks PlayStation’s sales records

• During its earnings call, Sony announced that Helldivers 2 had sold over 12 million units globally as of May 5, 2024 (spotted by Tom Warren). It took the game 12 weeks to reach this impressive milestone.
• The company noted that the sales far exceeded expectations, but it is unclear how they are split between PS5 and PC. It is worth noting that Circana previously estimated that Steam accounted for 60% of the game’s sales in the US.
• The 12 million milestone also makes Helldivers 2 the fastest-selling game published or developed by PlayStation, beating the previous record of God of War Ragnarök — 11 million copies sold in its first three months.

Sony says Helldivers 2 reached 12 million sales across PS5 and PC in the first 12 weeks since launch pic.twitter.com/wpcwWBzBVT

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 14, 2024

• Despite the commercial success, Helldivers 2 recently faced a huge backlash from players around the world after Sony announced a mandatory PSN account linking for the game’s Steam version. The Japanese company was forced to reverse this decision following a massive review bombing.
• However, the situation still doesn’t look good, as Helldivers 2 has been removed from sale in 177 countries where players can’t officially create a PSN account. Even after overturning a mandatory account linking, Sony didn’t return the game on sale and added more delisted countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).
• Valve later specified that the decision was made by Sony, not Steam, saying that “this game is not available in Steam right now for specific regions as decided by the publisher.”
• To make things even wilder, PlayStation stopped selling the upcoming PC version of Ghost of Tsushima in over 180 regions without PSN, refunding pre-orders for Steam users in affected countries.
• Sony itself hasn’t yet publicly commented on the situation, making many players wonder what next step the company might take.

Financial highlights for FY23

• According to its consolidated financial results, Sony’s Game & Network Services segment reached ¥4.26 trillion ($27.2 billion) in revenue last year, up 17% year-over-year.
• Operating income was ¥290.2 billion ($1.85 billion), up 16% year-over-year.
• Sony cited increased sales of third-party titles and the impact of foreign exchange rates as the main drivers of growth in FY23. Among the negative factors were increased losses from hardware and decreased sales of first-party games.

• Game sales amounted to ¥2.2 trillion ($14.2 billion), followed by hardware sales (¥1.2 trillion / $7.7 billion) and network services (¥545.5 billion / $3.5 billion).
• In FY23, Sony sold 20.8 million PlayStation 5 units. This is far below even the lowered forecast of 21 million units, not to mention the original expectations of 25 million. Overall, PS5 has now sold 59.2 million units since its launch in November 2020.
• Full game sales on PS4 and PS5 totaled 286.4 million copies, 39.7 million of which were first-party titles. The share of digital sales increased from 67% to 70% year-over-year.
• As of March 31, 2024, the PlayStation Network had 118 million monthly active users (MAU), an increase of 10 million compared to Q4 FY22. However, MAU decreased by 5 million quarter-over-quarter.