Summary:
- PlayStation VR headset will be shipped in October for a suggested retail price of USD $399.
- Parent-company Sony held its investors’ meeting and provided an overview of and forward guidance for its business lines.
- VR (and PlayStation TV) content will drive games and network revenue.
Sony hosted its annual investors’ meeting last week and provided a three-year financial and business outlook. In this post, we’ll focus highlights from Sony’s investors’ day, with a particular focus on one of its most relevant virtual reality-related segment: games and network services.
Sony sold more than 40 million units of PlayStation, and expects to sell 20 million this year. Sony also presented significant growth in its premium fee-based subscription service - from 10.0 million subscriptions in January 2015 to 20.8 million now.
In its games and network services segment presentation, Sony highlighted the Tokyo-headquartered company’s shift from selling packaged games to offering a comprehensive game-as-a-service platform that allows recurring customers to access and consume games, videos, music and TV programming across different devices by using the PlayStation network. PlayStation VR is a new addition to the PlayStation ecosystem that’s currently targeted to be used as a gaming console.
As shown in the chart from Sony’s presentation above, the Sony upped its Gaming & Network Services outlook for revenues and operating margin, highlighting non-gaming VR as one factor to drive this growth.
Much of the conversation from this year throughout the industry has been on various non-gaming usages for headsets like in the military, sports, healthcare, social interaction and more. Sony, like Facebook, HTC, Google, and many others, believes it can deliver such an offering.
For more on virtual reality as a platform strategy, attend the 2016 Virtual Reality Strategy Conference.
