Sony has announced that its next-gen (current-gen now?) console, the PlayStation 5, has sold over 40 million units worldwide. While the milestone is certainly impressive, according to analysis from Ampere’s Piers Harding-Rolls, it is still trailing slightly behind the PS4, which crossed the 40 million milestone two months earlier in its lifecycle. As of now, the PS4 remains Sony’s fastest-selling PlayStation ever.
According to Harding-Rolls, PS5’s sales were bolstered by Sony’s improved supply chain post-COVID-19, which allowed the company to post strong sales performance in 2023, as well as meet the pent-up demand from consumers for the previously hard-to-find console.
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“Overall, the current sales performance puts Sony in a good position to achieve its fiscal year shipment target of 25 million PS5s, but we’ll know more in the next few months. Ampere is currently forecasting PS5 sell-through of around 21 million PS5s in 2023,” Harding-Rolls said.
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Speaking about the sales milestone, Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said, “We launched PS5 in November 2020 and the world was in a strange and different place than when we announced the console in 2019. Despite the unprecedented challenges of COVID, our teams and our partners worked diligently to deliver PS5 on time…But now PS5 supply is well-stocked and we are seeing that pent-up demand finally being met.”
With Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth scheduled to release this year, it is unlikely that the PS5’s sales will drop soon.
Xbox, in the meanwhile, is still quite far behind. While Microsoft does not announce Xbox Series X and S sales figures, it was revealed last month that the combined sales of both consoles had crossed 21 million units worldwide. Based on this data, PS5 is outselling Xbox Series X and S by roughly two-to-one. However, things might potentially change once Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard in the coming months.
