PS4 sales beat 98 million as Sony gears up for PS5

The PlayStation 4 has now shipped more than 98 million units worldwide, solidifying its reign as the top-selling system of this generation. But sales are expected to slow as Sony shifts towards its next-gen PS5.

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Today Sony announce its Fiscal Year 2018 financials, reporting big earnings for its Games and Network Services branch. Total PS4 sales now sit at 98.6 million shipments, with Sony shipping 17.8 million systems in FY2018, down 6.3% year-over-year. Hardware sales accounted for 22% of Sony's total games segment revenues of 2.3 trillion yen ($20.7 billion).

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Now that the PlayStation 5 is on the horizon, Sony predicts PS4 sales will start moderating and slowing down. It expects to ship 16 million consoles in the next fiscal year, down 10% from last year, but was careful to say the next-generation PlayStation won't release in the next 12 months. Instead, the PS5 will release after April 2020, which puts its earliest launch in Sony's FY2020 financial year.

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PS4 sales should fall even further once Sony reveals and launches the PS5.

The company is currently ramping up R&D spending to shape the PlayStation 5's internal hardware, which includes higher-end AMD-powered tech like a Zen 2 CPU and Navi graphics architecture, complete with backward compatibility support for PS4 games, 8K video playback, and a fast hard drive.

Sources say devkits for the PlayStation 5 have been out for first-party developers for a while, and Sony just started sending them out to third-party games-makers.

Sony's PlayStation 5 details:

• 8 Core / 16 Thread Zen 2 CPU
• Navi GPU architecture
• 7nm node
• Ray-tracing support
• New 3D audio chip
• 8K resolution support
• New SSD (possibly m.2 drive with 2TB)
• 24GB GDDR6 shared memory (unconfirmed)
• 4GB of DDR4 memory for OS (unconfirmed)
• $499 price tag (unconfirmed)