Sony has released its financial results for the past fiscal year. Inside, it predicts a decrease in PS5 hardware sales during the next 12 months.
The report, which you can read in full on Sony’s corporate site, details on page 13 how Sony anticipates a “decrease in unit sales” between April 2026 – 2027.
At the bottom of this page, Sony elaborates on why it has predicted a decrease in PS5 sales, writing: “We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25.”
This memory shortage has been explicitly caused by the rise in generative AI technology, and has led to both price increases for gaming hardware as well as shortages in supply.
Valve recently blamed a shortage of Steam Decks on the AI boom, also announcing a delay for Steam Machines for similar AI reasons. This led Sony to reportedly consider a PS6 price hike, with Nintendo announcing a price hike for the Switch 2 in the US only today.
This problem is not expected to go away soon. Apple expects supply issues to continue into the foreseeable future, and new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has hinted that memory costs could impact pricing and availability of next-gen consoles.
If you want some sugar to help this particularly bitter news go down, Sony – on the same slide – predicted an increase in first-party game sales this fiscal year. So, if you have a PS5, one hopes you’ll at least have some cool stuff to play on it. If you can afford it in the first place.
