Sony Forecasts Record PS5 Sales as Intel, Nvidia Prepare New GPUs
February brought the latest round of financials and updates in the video game industry. Despite overall challenging market conditions, falling profits, and mass layoffs, there were a couple bright spots between the next Intel GPU, RTX 4070, and PS5 sales forecasts.
Intel Isn’t Quitting
After the rocky launch of Arc Alchemist GPUs, Intel appears to be committed to not only putting out its next generation of GPUs (Battle Mage), but avoiding past problems. Intel Fellow Tom Petersen confirmed that the architecture for future graphics will be split into integrated and discrete variants. (Courtesy of WCCFTech)
- LPG will be optimized for less powerful integrated GPUs.
- HPG will be optimized for gaming and more powerful applications.
- Intel also wants to avoid product bloat and streamline QA and driver support.
The next generation of Intel PGU isn't expected to be revealed until around the holiday season, at the soonest, but Intel is signaling that Arc’s delays and launch bugs weren’t enough to force it out of the discrete GPU market. Despite the wait for the next generation of Intel GPU, Battlemage, the company seems almost entirely focused on Battlemage and putting Alchemist (and a potential refresh of it) behind it. Intel may also opt for a smaller, but more focused lineup of GPUs.
Unfortunately, any Intel GPU news must be taken in the context of the company's overall performance. Intel's most recent quarter saw revenue plummet 28% YoY, which makes the future of Intel's struggling graphics segment even more uncertain.
Nvidia RTX 4070 Targeting April Launch
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is reportedly arriving in April. Sharing the same silicon and 12GB of GDDR6X memory as the recently launched $799 RTX 4070 Ti, the main question will be price. The last generation RTX 3070 launched "officially" at $499, but an increase to $599 or higher seems all but guaranteed. With Nvidia scheduling its annual GTC event for March 20-23, we'll likely have more details around the end of March.
- The mainstream-targeted RTX 4060 could potentially arrive in the summer.
Challenging economy or not, Sony is expecting record PS5 sales for Q4 FY 2022 (the first three months of 2023). After shipping 12.8 million PS5s in the last nine calendar months, Sony upped its forecast for FY 2022 to 19 million PS5s. The 6.2 million units it plans to ship this quarter would more than double the record of PS4s shipped in the first quarter of a calendar year. It’s worth noting that, PS5 shipments and sales are not the same, and retailers may find themselves needing to discount PS5s.
- Nintendo also announced it’s sold 122.55 million units of the Switch as of December 31.
- The Switch now surpasses the PS4 and Game Boy Color in lifetime sales.
- Nintendo, however, lowered its shipment forecasts for Q1 2023 from 19 million to 18 million.
- Xbox hardware revenue for the most recent quarter (Q2 FY 2023) dropped 13%, with software and services revenue falling 12%.
- Some of the hardware decline can be attributed to heavy discounting of the Xbox Series S during the holidays.
- Xbox will be counting on the H1 2023 release of Starfield to boost both hardware and software revenue.
Featured image courtesy of Microsoft
