Sony has released financial data for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 , which runs from April 1 to June 30 of this year. In general terms, both the sales and revenue figures are above those for the same period of the previous year, but we are going to see what has happened in the games division, which is what interests us.
The decrease in sales during this first quarter of fiscal year 2013 compared to 2012 is practically negligible: from 118,000 million yen it has gone to 117,900 million yen. Losses, on the other hand, have gone from 3.5 billion yen to 14.8 billion yen , mainly due to the costs derived from the development, production and promotion of the PS4. You can see it in the following table:
In terms of units sold, there is a very significant change to take into account with respect to the data from previous quarters. Sony displays the data grouped by desktop consoles, handheld consoles, and software. In the first case, the figures reflect the total number of units sold that add up to PS3 and PS2, but in this first quarter of fiscal year 2013 Sony leaves out the PS2 data (there is a note at the bottom of the table that warns of this). That is, during this period, from April to June 2013, the PS3 has sold 1,100,000 units on its own. It is difficult to compare it with the same period of the previous year, because in that figure, which is 2,800,000 units, the units sold of PS3 and PS2 are added.
The same thing happens for portable consoles: the figures offered are the result of the sum of PSP and PS Vita units sold . I have read on some sites that Sony is now hiding the sales figures for the PS Vita, but I have reviewed the documents for the quarters of the previous year and they have all offered the combined data on both desktop consoles and laptops. Would we like Sony to give the data for each console separately? Of course, but this is not new. And what we see is that during this period the sum of PSP and PS Vita is 600,000 units sold . A year ago the figure was 1,400,000 units. A pity that they do not show us what exactly has happened to the sales of each one of them, although we already see that they are not exactly going from strength to strength.
Finally we have the software, which includes both the physical and downloadable games. And here is a rise: 64,000,000 copies against the 43,000,000 copies registered during the same period last year. Even more than in Q2 2012.
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