Folks might not be happy with Sony right now, following its decision to scrap physical PlayStation game production starting in 2028, but you sure wouldn't think so, looking at the company's data from the last quarter.
There's no denying that Sony's killing off PlayStation discs has sparked a lot of backlash. Chants of "no disc, no buy" flooding social media comment sections and streams have been a regular since the move was announced back in August, and a fan-organized boycott known as the PlayStation Blackout (or PSBlackout) also kicked off that month in retaliation to the news.
You'd have expected that to impact Sony's player engagement stats – after all, the whole point of a boycott like that is for the company to see such a worrying decline that it's forced to backtrack on its decision. However, as shown in the company's latest financial earnings results, that's apparently not the case. In fact, its playtime for the last quarter (the three-month period ending on September 30) was up compared to the same period last year, and, more than that, September set a record for monthly active users.
"The number of monthly active users (MAUs) across the PlayStation (PS) platform in September increased 7% compared to the same month of the previous fiscal year to 127 million accounts," chief financial officer Lin Tao explains in comments transcribed by Sony. "That was a record high for September. Total playtime for the quarter increased 4% year-on-year."
This is such a significant improvement, in fact, that Sony reckons it signals an ongoing growth trend. "The year-on-year trend for both metrics improved significantly compared to the first quarter of this fiscal year, which we believe demonstrates that the baseline of engagement is steadily improving," Tao adds.
Looking at the data on monthly active users at the end of each quarter, the latest number is up 2 million from the previous quarter and 8 million from the same quarter last year.
For the "no disc, no buy" crowd, you could argue that they wouldn't necessarily have to buy any games – let alone any digital ones – to keep playing, but an increase in playtime for the quarter certainly doesn't suggest that the PlayStation Blackout had any noticeable impact, and the number of monthly users shows that folks haven't been put off from using the platform, either.
Despite the backlash, though, it's really not too surprising to see this. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella previously said that, in the US, "there was no significant change at all in player count or engagement in our tracking" due to the boycott. I suppose it's data like this that explains why Tao previously said that Sony doesn't "see that there will be any negative impact on our business" as a result of the decision to kill off physical games.
