PS5 Sales Drop Almost 50%, As Sony Discusses AI Ambitions, Including New Hair Tech

As part of Sony's latest earnings briefing, the company revealed that PlayStation 5 sales are down massively year-over-year, while management discussed what it believes will be a rosy future for the company thanks to AI-driven efficiencies.

In terms of PS5 sales, Sony reported that it had sold 46% fewer PS5 units during its fiscal Q4 than it did during the same quarter last year. More specifically, Sony sold 1.5 million PS5 units worldwide during the quarter, down from 2.8 million during the same period the year prior. The PS5 has now sold 93.7 million units worldwide.

Downward trends are expected for the PS5, as the system is now in its sixth year on the market. The PS5 is also more expensive than ever before, as Sony has raised the price of the console by $200 for its cheapest version since the system launched in 2020. During the earnings briefing, Sony blamed the latest downturn on "continued pressures in the global economic landscape."

Those "continued pressures" include AI-related impacts on PlayStation's business as part of the memory and chip crisis affecting numerous companies, not just Sony.

On the subject of AI, Sony Group president and CEO Totoki Hiroki said (via Variety) that Sony sees AI as becoming a "powerful tool," but he pushed back against the idea that it will replace humans.

For PlayStation specifically, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Nishino Hideaki said, "Our goal is always to be the best place to play and the best place to publish. We see AI as a powerful tool to help us in this mission."

Nishino said PlayStation's first-party studios around the world are already using AI systems to automate certain mundane tasks, improve productivity, and work more efficiently on QA tasks. 3D modeling and animation systems are also benefiting from AI, he said. Additionally, Nishino called out a technology called Mockingbird that PlayStation's teams are using to generate facial animations based on motion-capture data. "With Mockingbird, animation work that would have taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second," he said.

PlayStation's Naughty Dog and San Diego Studio teams are using these tools already, while Nishino also called out an AI-powered hair animation tool that can take video footage of hair and convert it into 3D models, cutting back on what used to be a lengthy and laborious task.

"These practical applications allow our teams to spend less time on manual, high-effort tasks and to instead reinvest their time into building richer worlds and gameplay for our players," Nishino said.

He added: "As AI capabilities evolve, the role of our creators will remain unchanged. The vision, the design, and the emotional impact of our games will always come from the talent of our studios and performers. AI is meant to augment their capabilities, not to replace them."

Also during Sony's earnings briefing, the company said its buyout of Bungie continues to be a sore spot in terms of financials and that PS6 plans remain up in the air due to ongoing global component shortages.

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