Sales figures attached to Sony's gaming arm, as is tradition, eclipsed that of other parts of the business. The quarter as a whole ended with Sony making roughly $3.5 billion profit (JP¥377 billion) from $22 billion in total sales (JP¥2.4 trillion). Of that, the PlayStation division accounted for around $670 million (JP¥73 billion) in profit from circa $7.3 billion total revenue (JP¥790 billion). Console sales were strong, but remember many were purchased at a discount thanks to holiday price cuts; an over 25 percent increase in game sales compared with the same three months last year helped neutralize that. PS Plus is more popular than ever, too, with 36.3 million subscribers on the books at the turn of the new year. No specifics on how well the PlayStation Classic was received, though.

On the investor call, the only risks Sony could come up that may impact its gaming branch were a glut of free-to-play titles that won't drive much revenue, and a distant future when consoles are no longer the money maker and game streaming services become the new model. Providing that service, à la PlayStation Now, presents something of an opportunity, however.

Perhaps more interesting than PlayStation's continued success is the fact Sony's gaming division was far from its highest earner this quarter. The music business boomed for Sony, pulling in just over double the profit of those losers in the PlayStation team. But how, when music revenue was mostly flat year-over-year? Some kind of accounting trickery, we suspect, though Sony blames finalizing its acquisition of EMI in November for this little piece of outlying data.