Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki has implied the ongoing memory crisis affecting the entire hardware industry has come at a fortuitous time for the PS5.

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about the Japanese giant’s transition from electronics to entertainment, he was asked whether spiralling component prices had come at the right time for the PS5 considering it’s already sold over 95 million units.

The executive said:

“It is lucky. We’re at the latter half of the lifecycle for the console, which means we don’t need to aggressively sell the console today. Rather than that, we’re focusing on the current user base. And already PS Plus has more than 125 million monthly active users today and how to monetise those users is quite important for us.”

While this is a direct quote from what Totoki said in the interview, I think he actually made a mistake here.

While it’s true that PlayStation had 125 million MAU as of 30th June, it’s highly unlikely these are all PS Plus subscribers.

In fact, Sony doesn’t disclose that number publicly, although when it did it tended to hover around 40-50 million members.

However, his comments are broadly consistent with what the company’s been saying for quite some time: it wants to wring its existing fanbase dry.

While this probably is a sound strategy during this period of turbulence, the platform holder needs to work much harder to ensure its customers are satisfied. (These past few months have been the most tumultuous I can remember since the PS3.)

And moreover, the timing of the memory crisis may be lucky for the PS5, but it all spells disaster for the PS6, which may not have a release date but is going to have to come out at some point in the relatively near future.

Totoki’s never going to show any concern in a carefully media trained interview like this, but I’m sure it’s not all sunshine and rainbows behind-the-scenes.

[source youtube.com]