Sony announces PS5 sales milestone, but older PlayStation is still king

Sony Interactive Leisure introduced right this moment that it has bought 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles by July 16, 2023 – 31 months for the reason that console’s launch in November, 2020. The spectacular determine represents items bought to prospects, which means the precise variety of items shipped is probably going a lot increased.

It is all the results of Sony lastly fixing the PS5’s provide downside, which impacted the provision of the console for a lot of, many months. PS5 consoles are on retailer cabinets in all places, and have been in inventory for round six months, which tremendously contributed to the console’s sturdy gross sales of late.

Sony Interactive Leisure CEO, Jim Ryan, acknowledged how supply-constrained the PS5 has been for a lot of its life.

“We launched PlayStation 5 in November 2020 and the world was in a wierd and totally different place than once we introduced the console in 2019. Regardless of the unprecedented challenges of COVID, our groups and our companions labored diligently to ship PS5 on time,” mentioned Ryan.

“We continued to face headwinds with the pandemic, and it took months for provide chains to normalize so we might have the stock to maintain up with demand. For extra months than I care to recollect, we saved thanking our group for his or her persistence whereas working by means of these points. However now PS5 provide is well-stocked and we’re seeing that pent up demand lastly being met.”

The demand for PlayStation 5 has been so sturdy, in reality, that 6.3 million items had been bought between January and March of this 12 months. That mentioned, PS4 stays Sony’s fastest-selling console ever, having reached the identical 40 million milestone two months earlier.

Had the PS5 not suffered from poor availability for so long as it has, maybe it might have overtaken the PS4 there. Contemplating this momentum, it might be fully plausible for the PS5 to finish up beating the PS4’s lifetime gross sales.

Not like Sony, after all, Microsoft hasn’t been sharing {hardware} gross sales figures for any of its consoles for an extended whereas now. Reviews point out that there are round 21 million Xbox Sequence consoles within the wild. If true, that will imply an almost two-to-one lead for PS5, which isn’t uncommon, notably given the PS4’s reign over the past technology.