14 DAY TRIAL // The Games & Network division at Sony is announcing that the PlayStation 4 has reached the 40 million in sales milestone as of March 31 of this year and that it has managed to significantly improve its overall revenue, reaching 13.7 billion (12.8 billion Euro), an increase of 11.8 percent over the previous fiscal year.
According to the company, the number of home consoles that was delivered to players during fiscal year 2015 was 17.7 million, which is an improvement over the 14.8 million of fiscal year 2014, a trend that is not usually seen in the video game hardware space.
Sony is also claiming that the overall revenue associated with the PlayStation Network has reached 4.9 billion dollars (4.5 billion Euro) for the previous fiscal year, which is a big increase over the 3.2 billion dollars (2.9 billion Euro) of the previously tracked period.
The company confirms that sales of the PlayStation 3 have continued to drop fast, but its performance is no longer affecting the bottom line of the company in any way.
Sony is also unwilling to talk about its projections for fiscal 2016 because one of its manufacturing plants has been affected by the recent Kumamoto earthquake that affected Japan.
The PlayStation 4 might get the new NEO version before year's end
Sony has said that the new home console has performed better than its own projections estimated and to keep up the pace it might deliver a new version, with improved hardware, before the end of the year.
The NEO is rumored to be a more powerful device, which will introduce improved technology for the CPU, the AMD-made GPU and the RAM, and will offer a range of new features that include at least some support for 4K resolution.
Sources are saying that Sony is aiming to make an official announcement in the summer, probably during the E3 2016 event, and that it will launch the new version of the PS4 in time for the all-important holiday shopping season.
Apparently, developers will have to create two versions of their coming video games, one for the base version of the hardware and another for the NEO, which has some grumbling about the extra resources they have to invest.
Sony is also getting ready to deliver its own PlayStation VR virtual reality platform during October, which will deliver other improvements to its bottom line, although the new tech and the NEO are not designed to boost one another.