Sony Posts Record Gaming Profits for FY2025, But Bungie Losses and PS6 Uncertainty Steal the Spotlight
- Sagar Mankar
- 26 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Sony has released its financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, painting a picture that is largely positive but comes with some significant caveats.
The company's Game and Network Services segment, which covers PlayStation, posted strong numbers across the board for the full year. But a massive impairment loss tied to Bungie and some genuine uncertainty around the PS6's future kept the celebration from being entirely clean.
The PlayStation Numbers
Let's start with the raw data, because there is quite a bit to unpack here.
Q4 FY2025 Key Metrics:
PS5 units sold in Q4: 1.5 million
Lifetime PS5 units sold: 93.7 million
Full game software units sold: 74.6 million
First-party software units: 5.8 million
Digital download ratio: 85%
Monthly Active Users (March 2026): 125 million
That 1.5 million PS5 figure for the quarter is a notable drop. Sony sold 2.8 million units in the same period last year, and for context, the PS4 moved 2.6 million units during the equivalent point in its lifecycle. Hardware momentum is clearly slowing down, and Sony has been pretty open about acknowledging that.
On the services front, however, things look much healthier. Monthly Active Users hit 125 million in March, which is a record high for a fourth quarter and a 1% increase year-on-year. Total play time also grew 1% in Q4. The network services side of the business continues to hold its weight.
The Bungie Situation Is Getting Worse
This is the part of the report that no one at Sony is thrilled about. The Bungie impairment losses have been significant, and they are not going away quietly.
Bungie Impairment Losses FY2025:
Q2 FY2025: 31.5 billion yen
Q4 FY2025: 88.6 billion yen (approximately $565 million)
FY2025 Total: 120.1 billion yen (approximately $765 million)
Sony acquired Bungie back in 2022 for $3.6 billion, riding the wave of Destiny 2's best expansion period. Just over four years later, the returns are far from what was expected. As per Sony's CFO Lin Tao, "earnings from Bungie's title portfolio did not reach our expectations, so we downwardly revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill."
Marathon, Bungie's first new IP in over a decade, launched on March 5. Two months on, Sony has still not released any sales figures for the extraction shooter. The game is currently hovering between 10,000 and 15,000 concurrent players on Steam, and has failed to consistently appear in the weekly top-10 most played charts on any major platform.
That said, Sony is not writing it off just yet. Lin Tao added, "Player reception to Marathon is strong, with the game receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level. Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience and expansion of the user base."
Destiny 2 is also at its lowest Steam player count ever, which adds another layer of pressure on the studio. Bungie has already gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since the acquisition, and its previous CEO Pete Parsons was replaced. Sony has also flagged that additional losses related to Bungie could be recorded in FY2026, meaning this chapter is far from closed.
AI Takes Centre Stage
Beyond the financial numbers, a surprisingly large chunk of Sony's presentation was dedicated to artificial intelligence. PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino laid out an ambitious case for how AI is already being used across the business and where it is headed next.
On the development side, Sony's studios have built an internal tool called Mockingbird, which generates 3D facial animations based on performance capture data. Nishino noted, "Animation work that would have taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second." The tool has already been used in released titles, with Naughty Dog and San Diego Studio among those adapting it.
Hair animation is another area where AI is being applied. Teams are feeding videos of real hairstyles into an AI tool that outputs detailed 3D strand models, cutting down what used to be a heavily manual process. Gran Turismo's AI-powered racing agent was also highlighted, along with experiments involving NPCs that carry their own personalities and can interact dynamically with players.
On the platform business side, AI-powered payment routing tools have reportedly generated over $700 million in incremental revenue over the past three years. Sony is also leaning into AI-driven personalisation, with Nishino hinting at a future where the platform can recommend not just the next game, but the next in-game moment, subscription, or accessory to suit a player's interests.
Sony Group CEO Hiroki Totoki was clear about the company's underlying philosophy, stating, "Human creativity must remain at the center. AI is a powerful tool, but it is not a replacement for artists or creators. It is an amplifier of human imagination and a catalyst for new possibilities."
Separately, Sony and Bandai Namco announced a collaborative pilot initiative focused on how generative AI can contribute to realising a creator's vision in video production. According to Totoki, the partnership has already uncovered "massive gains in speed and productivity per person" and produced practical insights into addressing AI's known weaknesses around consistency and controllability.
FY2026 Forecast and the PS6 Question
For the coming fiscal year, Sony is forecasting G&NS segment sales of 4,420 billion yen, a 6% decrease, driven primarily by an expected decline in PS5 hardware sales. Operating income, however, is forecast to jump 30% to 600 billion yen, with the absence of the Bungie impairment charges doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.
Sony noted that its FY2026 operating income forecast is "essentially flat year-on-year, which is due to the incorporation of an increase in investments for the next-generation platform." Without those investments, current business profits are expected to grow at a double-digit rate. That is about as close to a formal PS6 acknowledgment as financial documents tend to get.
However, Sony boss Hiroki Totoki made it clear that nothing is set in stone yet. "We have not yet decided on at what timing we will launch the new console, or at what prices," he said, adding that memory prices are expected to remain high through FY2027 due to supply shortages driven by AI infrastructure demand. Totoki noted that Sony is exploring various options, including potentially changing its business model for the next console generation.
On PS5 hardware supply, Sony stated that shipment volumes in FY2026 will be based on the amount of memory it can procure at reasonable prices. That means availability could be shaped as much by supply chain conditions as by consumer demand.