Shrinking the user base would be selling negative amounts, wich they can't.
There's the a difference between console userbase and its active userbase.
Console userbase is the amount of consoles sold, which only grows because it includes the ones collecting dust.
The active userbase (the one I was talking about), in this case monthly active userbase, is the people who played the last month. If they continue playing, means they continue paing for games, addons ro gamesubs.
I was more talking about from the PS4 era, not from last year.
Here you have a comparision of this quarter vs how they were at the same point in the PS4 era, there is a substantial growth (a third in active userbase, half in content & services revenue):
Here you have a detailed comparision of their total revenue and the one from hardware, software, game subs and "others" (now are just accessories, back then included off-PS first party revenue there). In addition to hardware and software units, digital software ratio. A huge increase in all metrics except hardware units (increased in revenue, but not in units):
Back then they didn't share quarterly first-party sales units, so we can't make a direct comparision and we have to make a guesstimate with the available data. As reference, this Q1FY18 quarter was the one after the one where they released the record breaking GoW 2018.
We see there that this Q1FY25 first-party were 10.47% of the full game PS sales and last fiscal, not counting addons. And in the whole FY24 were 9.53%. So let's say it's now roughly a 10%.
Back in 2018 their "game software" revenue didn't include the off-PS first-party revenue, and addons were a smaller percent of it than it's now. To make a very rough guesstimate, let's check a 10% of the 268,243 bn yen they posted as software revenue back then to try to guess more or less their first party revenue: it would be 26,824 bn yen. It's roughly the same they did in Q1FY25 as off-PS first-party revenue: 25,330 bn yen.
Meaning, with first party games nowadays Sony pretty likely is making outside PS alone roughly the same money they were making in PS the quarter after they released GoW 2018. And nowadays in PS pretty likely they make way more revenue (remember, Sony broke their fastest selling game records with titles released in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024) than they did back in 2018 specially thanks to the addons revenue from the 1st party GaaS in PS.
Meaning, doing a super rough guesstimate, seems that pretty likely (specially thanks to GaaS and off-PS) Sony should be making over twice first-party revenue than they were doing back in Q1FY18.
