Current Events > $10 bil of value wiped from Sony's stock after it cut PS5's sales forecast

(+) Yeah! (+)

Around $10 billion of value was wiped off Sonys
stock last week, after the Japanese tech giant cut its sales forecast for its flagship PlayStation 5 console for the fiscal year.

Analysts, who already thought Sonys PS5 target was too lofty, told CNBC a bigger issue for the company are its declining margins in its key gaming business.

Sony this week announced it now expects to sell 21 million units of the PS5 in the fiscal year ending in March, compared with a previous forecast of 25 million units.

The companys shares fell after the announcement, with around $10 billion of value wiped off the stock since the forecast cut, according to a CNBC calculation using FactSet data.

But analysts were watching another key metric the operating margin in the gaming business which came in just under 6% for the December quarter, according to a CNBC calculation. By contrast, Sonys operating margin was more than 9% in the December quarter of 2022.

The shipment forecast cut for PS5 ... is not what is disappointing ... What is disappointing is the low level of operating margin, Atul Goyal, equity analyst at Jefferies, said in a note to clients on Wednesday.

He added that prior to the January-to-March quarter of 2022, margins at the gaming unit were around 12% to 13% in the previous four years.

The latest quarters single-digit margin for Sony is present despite various tailwinds that should have driven up the margins towards 20%, Goyal said, adding that the situation is extremely disappointing.

These tailwinds include sales of its first-party games, which are increasingly in the form of digital downloads, in addition to its high-margin PS Plus subscription service, which commands around 50% margin, according to Goyal.

Their rev (revenue) on digital sales, add-on-content, digital-downloads are at all time highs And yet their margins are at decade-lows. This is just not acceptable, Goyal said in an email to CNBC.

Goyal qualified that the current margin for Sonys gaming business is almost near decade lows.

The analyst questioned how, with all of these higher-margin products, the gaming divisions operating margin has remained so depressed.

Serkan Toto, CEO and founder of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games, said he believed hardware production costs have actually come down, since the PlayStation 5 is more than three years old and Sony would have better economies of scale by this time.

Toto said that part of the reason why margins are being squeezed more recently is that software production costs have been rising.

Spiderman 2, which came out last year and is produced by Sony-owned Insomniac Games, cost around $300 million to make, according to gaming website Kotaku, citing an internal presentation that was leaked after a ransomware group hacked the company.

So these budgets seemed to have a significant impact on their gaming margin over time, Toto said.

Sony and Insomniac Group did not immediately respond to CNBCs requests for comment.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/19/sony-gaming-margin-questioned-after-ps5-sales-cut-sparks-stock-plunge.html

Studios need to return to their roots. No more AAA bs. Start innovating and the money will follow.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1577547e.jpg

boomgetchopped3 posted...

Studios need to return to their roots. No more AAA bs. Start innovating and the money will follow.

They cant afford to do that anymore really with the 5-10 year cycles. Its a lot easier to do that in other mediums of entertainment that only need 6 months-1 year to have a viable product once it gets started.

9 figure budget video games aren't sustainable. Sony's gonna realize that within the next two years.

boomgetchopped3 posted...

Studios need to return to their roots. No more AAA bs. Start innovating and the money will follow.

I wouldn't say no to some AAA but they definitely need to stop chasing cod money. Sony had so many great ips like sly cooper, syphon filter, crash, twisted metal and so on and most have been largely forgotten. They need to realize that they need to pad their console with smaller releases like these.

It honestly feels like most AAA games are made to extort consumers rather than entertain.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3496215c.jpg

Nothingburger tbh

A lot of tech and video game companies are going to trend down this year. The COVID bubble is over and inflation means stuff like video games get less of a priority.

Sony in shambles.

oh, that's good for them, then.

thanks for the post.

edit: at post 7

More fun, simpler games like Returnal
Less AAA hundred million dollar "cinematic blockbusters"

Problem solved.

i think this console or the next needs to be the last gen for a long time, the industry needs a chance to catch up and figure out how to make games at the current AAA level faster and cheaper.

5 year "do or die" development cycles for games is bad, and it's going to kill the industry or every halfway decent studio left

Jagr_68 posted...

More fun, simpler games like Returnal
Less AAA hundred million dollar "cinematic blockbusters"

Problem solved.

Returnal made fuck all compared to a game like Spider-Man 2

Punished_Blinx posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3496215c.jpg

Nothingburger tbh

A lot of tech and video game companies are going to trend down this year. The COVID bubble is over and inflation means stuff like video games get less of a priority.

Look at their NYSE stock for the past 30 days. It's down 10%.

It's not the end of the world but I'm certain the shareholders are taking notice and watching more closely at the Playstation division.

Heavy_D_Forever posted...

Look at their NYSE stock for the past 30 days. It's down 10%.

It's not the end of the world but I'm certain the shareholders are taking notice and watching more closely at the Playstation division.

I know that. But you don't invest in a company for two weeks. It's supposed to be a long term investment.

But yes Sony's results were disappointing so some people sold. Same thing happened to Nintendo this week too. They lost about $4 billion in value due to the rumor that Switch 2 is next year. Investors who invested a year ago or longer and sold made a profit.

What overall matters is the overall long term trend and if investors see potential. 2024 is going to be a rough year for video games as basically everything is trending down as less people are spending money on them and there's nothing releasing this year that will show growth compared to the last few years. But it'll bounce back.

Less than 10% but thats still quite a bit

Punished_Blinx posted...

Returnal made fuck all compared to a game like Spider-Man 2

It sold just over a million copies between PS5 and Steam relying completely on word of mouth instead of traditional marketing so I mean no shit a niche shooter sold like peanuts against Spider-Man 2.

BUT my point was that the returns for that game were just as great, if not superb for a smaller budget title.

Jagr_68 posted...

It sold just over a million copies between PS5 and Steam relying completely on word of mouth instead of traditional marketing so I mean no shit a niche shooter sold like peanuts against Spider-Man 2.

BUT my point was that the returns for that game were just as great, if not superb for a smaller budget title.

It's not just about the pure sales numbers.

Let's just say Returnal needs 1 million to sell a profit. We know Spider-man 2 needed 7 million from those leaks.

Spider-man 2 has sold 10 million already. So every game sale from now on will make money. Then they'll do the PC port for cheap and it'll sell more. Then they'll remaster it for cheap on the PS6 and it'll sell more. Then they'll bundle it with the other Spider-man games as a trilogy and it'll sell more again. That profit margin just gets larger and larger as time goes on even though the initial cost was ridiculously high. On top of that it makes it more difficult for games like Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad to stack up and compete.

As much as I love these smaller single player AA games unfortunately it doesn't really solve their issue of having small profit margins. That's all games like Returnal really offer at best. We can see this issue from companies like Devolver and Focus who basically solely make those games and nobody is investing into those companies.

That's not to say that Sony can't do better. They can. Overall it's stuff like Helldivers 2 they need more of. They need that high profit margin stuff so the single player AA games and AAA games with long development are offset. They are releasing smaller scale games like Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade this year and it's obvious why investors aren't throwing money at them.

Punished_Blinx posted...

I know that. But you don't invest in a company for two weeks. It's supposed to be a long term investment.

But yes Sony's results were disappointing so some people sold. Same thing happened to Nintendo this week too. They lost about $4 billion in value due to the rumor that Switch 2 is next year. Investors who invested a year ago or longer and sold made a profit.

What overall matters is the overall long term trend and if investors see potential. 2024 is going to be a rough year for video games as basically everything is trending down as less people are spending money on them and there's nothing releasing this year that will show growth compared to the last few years. But it'll bounce back.

I agree with all of that, but shareholders and more importantly the board of directors are more greedy than I've ever seen. Short term losses are leading to massive job cuts across the entire tech industry right now. It's really fucked up and CEO's start sweating whenever they see any losses.

Heavy_D_Forever posted...

I agree with all of that, but shareholders and more importantly the board of directors are more greedy than I've ever seen. Short term losses are leading to massive job cuts across the entire tech industry right now. It's really fucked up and CEO's start sweating whenever they see any losses.

Yep. It's going to be a rough year that we'll probably feel for a while. A whole shitload of things will be cancelled behind the scenes this year.

It's a bit of a nerve wracking point of these companies as they are all gradually realising that the audience isn't growing anymore. Not even for mobile which was often the safe thing for them to point at. So what now?

Punished_Blinx posted...

It's not just about the pure sales numbers.

Let's just say Returnal needs 1 million to sell a profit. We know Spider-man 2 needed 7 million from those leaks.

Spider-man 2 has sold 10 million already. So every game sale from now on will make money. Then they'll do the PC port for cheap and it'll sell more. Then they'll remaster it for cheap on the PS6 and it'll sell more. Then they'll bundle it with the other Spider-man games as a trilogy and it'll sell more again. That profit margin just gets larger and larger as time goes on even though the initial cost was ridiculously high. On top of that it makes it more difficult for games like Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad to stack up and compete.

As much as I love these smaller single player AA games unfortunately it doesn't really solve their issue of having small profit margins. That's all games like Returnal really offer at best. We can see this issue from companies like Devolver and Focus who basically solely make those games and nobody is investing into those companies.

That's not to say that Sony can't do better. They can. Overall it's stuff like Helldivers 2 they need more of. They need that high profit margin stuff so the single player AA games and AAA games with long development are offset. They are releasing smaller scale games like Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade this year and it's obvious why investors aren't throwing money at them.

The problem here is that the suits aren't settling for those expectations so their goal is to only greenlight Spidermans and TLOUs as a means of guaranteed gains while everything else is neglected.

It's not exactly as dire like the live service model ruining studios after one try because they're single player games but you can tell sooner or later the bubble is gonna burst if we start hearing about 1 billion dollar video games