AMD passes an epic gaming milestone — but is console demand cooling off? Leave a comment
Chipmaker AMD quietly revealed on Tuesday that it had handed a mind-boggling gaming milestone, but the announcement got here amid less-rosy numbers about its total gaming enterprise.
The Santa Clara-based firm launched its fiscal 12 months earnings report for 2024, revealing the corporate surpassed 100 million shipped models throughout the quarter that resulted in December. Those models are semi-custom processors that energy a lot of the gaming consoles on the planet.
AMD makes {custom} chips for the Sony Playstation 4 and PlayStation 5, the newest Xbox consoles, the Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, the Acer Nitro Blaze, and the Steam Deck.
The milestone could also be overshadowed by the information that AMD gaming income was down 59% 12 months over 12 months within the fourth quarter.
During the three months ending December 2024, AMD’s gaming phase earned $563 million, in comparison with $1.4 billion in the identical interval in 2023.
Even although the gaming income beat estimates of $498 million for the quarter, that is nonetheless an enormous drop.
AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that within the months forward, she expects gaming income to be down from the earlier quarter but much less down than different elements of AMD’s enterprise.
“We would expect gaming business will be down a little less [than the corporate average],” Su informed funding analysts throughout a Q&A session following the discharge of earnings.
“That’s a little atypical from a seasonality standpoint, but we’re coming off of a year when there was a lot of, let’s call it, inventory normalization, and now that inventory is normalized, we would expect [gaming revenue in Q1] would be down a little bit less than the corporate average.”
(Inventory normalization might be understood as a discount within the manufacturing of chips, maybe due to decrease demand).
Is the gaming console market cooling off?
So, is the gaming console market cooling off? Let’s take a look at Sony.
In November, Sony executives informed analysts throughout an earnings name that they had been forecasting promoting 18 million PS5s throughout the 2024 fiscal 12 months, regardless of questions in regards to the worth of the PS5 Pro. (Sony’s 2024 fiscal 12 months ends on March 31, 2025.) In the 2023 fiscal 12 months, Sony offered 20.8 million PS5s.
The PlayStation 2, the top-selling console of all time at 160 million models offered, was equally as profitable as Sony says the PS5 will probably be in 2024: Sony shipped 18.07 million PS2s for the fiscal 12 months ending in 2001.
Essentially, the numbers present that demand remained largely the identical relating to PS2 in 2001 because it does the PS5 in 2024.
And in enterprise, for those who’re not rising, you are cooling. Su and AMD’s forecast for gaming income in Q1 — that it is going to be down barely from the earlier quarter — could be the newest sign that the console cooldown continues.
The upshot of this information is the flurry of recent handheld gaming PCs — a lot of which use semi-custom AMD processors — which might be coming onto the market. Almost the ability of a gaming laptop computer in a handheld type issue may usher in a brand new period of gaming that depends much less on the console and is extra in regards to the handheld.
And for those who’re feeling the console cooldown, you can all the time attempt Laptop Mag‘s most well-liked machine, the gaming laptop computer.