Sony won't kill PS4: 'We'll drive a multi-generational PlayStation ecosystem into the future'

Sony has no plans to kill the PlayStation 4 just yet--in fact, the platform is still a major contributor to the brand and is serving as a stable bedrock of earnings.

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Nearly 12 years after release and the PlayStation 4 is still going strong. Sony today revealed how the last-gen PS4 is helping mitigate risk for the games division, and underlined that PS4 support isn't going anywhere any time soon.

During its annual corporate business strategy briefing, Sony asserted that the current PlayStation ecosystem is multi-generational and that PS4 users are still "active and spending" across the network. Company finance SVP Lynn Azar makes an interesting pointing regarding how Sony's virtuous cycle was key for continued growth, and how much the PS5's gen 9 is affected by the successful framework of its predecessor.

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This level of cross-generational overlap on spending has helped the PlayStation 5 achieve an eye-opening $136 billion in sales revenue across the last five fiscal years, alongside the best-ever profits for a PlayStation console generation of $13 billion (representing a ~9.5% profit margin).

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Below we have a quick transcript of what Azar said during the business stream:

"We're still exploring what the future of our platform will look like.

"I'd like to re-emphasize that our financial profile as a business has evolved inline with our strategy. So we've reduced traditional cyclicality by establishing a large ecosystem of players across both the PS5 and PS4 generations, which provides recurring revenues.

"This has driven an overall high and stable level of spend on content and services, which by the way now constitutes 2/3rds of our revenue, providing a consistent, predictable, and profitable base of our revenue.

"PS5 represents the most engaged players with the highest spend per player versus prior generations.

"But our PS4 players are still active and spending as well.

"So by providing players with increasing options of how to access the platform, we're able to better target different play patterns and monetization profiles of different customer segments.

"As we continue to drive multi-generational ecosystem into the future, we'll provide new ways for players to access the platform and experience our content and services."

In other news, Sony is currently laying out the early plans for its next-generation PlayStation 6 console, but no exact details were revealed during the stream.

Yet a new system does appear to be in the works. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino did say that most players don't want to rely on things like cloud streaming to play games, and that most prefer to play games via local hardware.

"Our console business has evolved into a multi-faceted platform, and we now have a large ecosystem of highly engaged players across both the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 generations, therefore there's huge interest in our next-generation console strategy," Nishino said.

"The future of the platform is top of mind."