Sony has released its financials for the three months ended June 30, 2019, and it looks like a slight drop off in software revenue has negatively impacted the company's video game division.
According to the report, sales within the console maker's Game & Network Services division dropped to 457.5 billion yen ($4.21 billion) from 472.1 billion yen ($4.34 billion) year-over-year, while operating income also fell to 73.8 billion yen ($679.8 million) from 83.5 billion yen ($769.2 million) over that same period.
Sony is attributing that decline to a "decrease in contribution" from first-party software along with dwindling sales of third-party titles, and while overall software revenue fell to 241.3 billion yen ($2.22 billion) from 268.2 billion yen ($2.47 billion), unit sales of PlayStation 4 full game software actually rose to 42.9 million from 40.6 million.
Notably, digital downloads were responsible for 53 percent of those 42.9 million sales, which is a big increase on last year when digital titles accounted for just 32 percent of software sold during the first quarter.
Elsewhere, PlayStation 4 hardware revenue rose to 101.6 billion yen ($935.9 million) from 98.9 billion yen ($911.1 million), although year-over-year unit sales remained flat at 3.2 million. The console also hit a major milestone during the quarter, and has now shipped over 100 million units worldwide.
Based on those results, Sony has downwardly revised its full year forecast for the games segment, and now predicting sales of 2.2 trillion yen ($20.3 billion) and operating income of 280 billion yen ($2.6 billion) by the end of the fiscal year on March 31, 2020.
Briefly glancing at the company as a whole, Sony reported consolidated sales of 1.92 trillion yen ($17.7 billion), down by 1 percent year-over-year, and profits of 119.22 billion yen ($1.1 billion) for the first quarter.
