In what will absolutely surprise no one, a chip shortage hit the PlayStation 5 late last year. Don’t expect that to change yet.
During the quarterly financial earnings In Sony’s most recent reports, the company’s gaming division saw an increase in profits. However, as notes Archyde.comSony cut its annual PS5 sales from 14.8 million units to 11.5 million for the fiscal year ending March 31.
According Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki (via Venture Beat), demand is still quite high, constant and unaffected by the pandemic. “We can’t say for sure what the demand is for next year,” Totoki added. However, chip production has been affected by the pandemic and the company’s partners are still unable to fulfill orders. And so the shortage of components continues.
Sony is building up its PS5 inventory, but Totoki expects the component shortage to continue for now. Could be especially hard to find a PS5 during the first half of the year. This is not a surprise. As Kotaku reported last fall, the global chip shortage was expected to continue into 2022. It could last longer than that. Intel previously declared that the semiconductor shortage could continue until 2023.
Obviously, Sony is not the only company affected by all this. In November of last year, Nintendo trimmed Switch production and predicted a 20 percent decline in availability. Around the same time, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that I expected shortage in 2022, but gave a much more nuanced reason.
“I think it’s probably too isolated to talk about it as a chip issue,” Spencer said. at that moment. “When I think about what it means to get the parts needed to build a console today and then get it to markets where there is demand, there are multiple kinds of pain points in that process.”
Making game consoles is tricky, especially during a pandemic. try to get one too.