I'm still not seeing how they're going to achieve that considering all things point to them not doing a price cut any time soon and what they said about big franchise IPs not releasing this FY.
What are they cooking?
You take the normal rate of decrease of people who want to buy the PS5 at 500 dollars (more in Europe) and given that they sold 20 million last year, they would probably sell at least 12-14 million without a price cut this year.
You ask what they're cooking? And that is the PS5 Pro, which by itself will probably sell 4-6 million units this year.
And just because they don't have big franchise IP releasing, doesn't mean they won't have anything release or that they won't do promotions during the holiday.
They'll have a better sense of PS5 demand at the end of Q1 and how it compared to systems in the past, but I don't think they'll have any problem hitting 18 million, but even they were short a million or two, it would be sound for them not to drop the price before the release of GTA6.
Imagine they sell 16 million units this year. Let's go even further, let's say 15 million.
Let's say they are losing 30 dollars per device at current prices. That's 450 million dollars lost. Now let's take half of those sales (7.5 million) and add an extra 100 dollars off per device, and now they sell an additional 4 million units at 130 dollars lost per device.
You still have the initial 225 million loss, but then add 11.5 million at 130 dollars per device. That's 1.495 billion dollars only to sell an extra 4 million units, that you would have already sold to next year when GTA6 comes out.
Sony wants to focus on profitability over units sold. They can bring unit sales up next year.