During Sony's quarterly financial conference call for investors and analysts, Deputy President and Chief Financial Officer Kenichiro Yoshida talked about the performance of its mobile games, Everybody's Golf and Fate/Grand Order, on top of commenting about the expected trends in the lifetime cycle of the PS4.
First of all, Yoshida-san mentioned that Everybody's Golf by Sony Interactive Entertainment's mobile arm Forwardworks has been downloaded over two million times since its release in Japan on July 4th. Moving forward, the company plans to expand the business by launching Aida of Sky and Sea” by Sakura Wars Creator Oji Hiroi at the beginning of October.
In the presentation it was also mentioned that Fate/Grand Order (which is actually part of the Sony Music Entertainment portfolio) enjoyed "strong performance" that contributed to a significant improvement (18.8%) year-on-year for the Music segment.
Later in the call, Yoshida-san explained that the game is "making a great contribution" to the business.
Talking about consoles, Yoshida-san explained during his prepared remarks that the significant year-on-year drop in income for the Game & Network Services segment was due to the fact that last year profit was driven by Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, while this year there was no similar launch in the related quarter.
Asked about the situation of first party titles expected in future quarters, Yoshida-san mentioned that the company isn't in the position to comment about what will happen in the next fiscal year, but there are general trends in the console market. Business performance will be linked to those general trends to a certain extent, and based on those trends there is a peak for hardware sales, and that happened last year, while the peak for software sales and profits is likely to take place next year. The company does not expect to deviate from those trends, and aims to "stabilize the profit structure" by 2018.
Yoshida-san concluded by mentioning Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Everybody's Golf and Gran Turismo Sport as upcoming first party games (there was a fourth, but the name was unintelligible probably due to the translator not being familiar with the title. I suspect it was Knack II, which is titled Knack: The Two Heroes and the Ancient Army in Japanese, and it's quite a mouthful).
If you want to read more about Sony's performance in the past fiscal quarter, including an update on PS4 shipments as of June 30th, 2017, you can find it all in our dedicated article.