PS5 Sales Reach 59.3 Million as Sony Falls Just Short of Fiscal Year Forecast

It's still more or less keeping pace with the monstrously successful PS4 despite launching at the height of Covid and the associated global chip shortage crisis [edit: also forgot to mention the cost of living crisis we've had post-Covid]. I have literally no idea how anyone could consider that anything less than a resounding success, or why their expectations were higher than that.

Then again, I feel increasingly out of touch with expectations from both corporations and the public.

This ^

The fact it was extremely difficult to source and buy for the first two years makes this even more impressive.

So basically Sony is admitting that PS5 sales will not catch up to sales of PS4. At least short term.
PS5 is already behind and Sony is forecasting 18 million consoles sold in next fiscal year, while PS4 sold 19 million at the same timeframe after release.

@LN78 yes me too, I remember not being able to play VR games, and I miss longer load times and not having haptic controllers with pressure sensors, like in the good old days of PS3.

So sales figures are up year on year even without any first party exclusives, imagine how they will do when they actually get back to putting out first party games. I think the PS5 will easily reach the one hundred million mark.

Their first prediction was for 25m sales and they evaluate it to 21m

@Godot25 in November 2023 trackers were showing that by the same period of time the Ps4 sales were 400k infront of the Ps5, that's with the Ps5 having a global chip shortage for two years and hardly any first party exclusives. With all things considered it's actually doing well to keep up with the Ps4.

@UltimateOtaku91

True, although the second party exclusive output has been strong this year I don't recall Sony bothering to really market helldiver's, ronin, stellar blade or Pacific drive.
That's a very strong exclusive line up yet I expect they'll go all in on concord

PS5 being "only" a 800k units behind the PS4, being a console that:

• Was released in the middle of a pandemic.
• Barely had stock in the first two years.
• Haven't received a price cut yet.
• Has received a price increase.

Is quite a feat.

@get2sammyb do u know if they counting psvr2 and portal sales in these numbers? because Sony never gives sales for these devises there was a rumor psvr2 and portal sales are combine with ps5.

Missing a big piece of information wrt to being slightly behind ps4 in that the ps4 had already had a price cut and the ps5 hasn’t so it’s very impressive especially since the ps5 cost quite a bit more than the ps4 even before that console had its price cut.

@Arxagelos lol no why would they do that

@Anthony_Daniels dude they marketed the hell out of ronin and especially Stellar Blade

@get2sammyb I def see a price cut once the pro releases

@dark_knightmare2
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2023/11/ps-portal-will-be-tracked-as-a-console-by-usa-data-firm-circana

@Arxagelos I know the Portal sales count as an accessory like the dualsense etc but the PSVR2 shouldn't really be included as its needs the console to be used.

The next few months will be the tester as by year 4, the PS4 had cleared 76 million units.

@UltimateOtaku91 I think we can finally put "bu bu but COVID shortages" behind us.
Because PS5 had surge of sales in late 2022-early 2023 that were responses to previous shortages. Basically that period covered late 2021-early 2023 when there were actual shortages. There are many reports that are basically saying that Sony and Microsoft have warehouses full of consoles that people don't want.

Let's not forget that Sony forecasted 25 million consoles and they achieved 20,8 million. So that's with plenty of discounts on console hardware. So Sony was prepared to ship 25 million consoles into shops around the world and they only shipped 20,8 million.

It's also hilarious that nobody uses "but but but shortages" when they are talking about Series X/S sales

Actual reality is that PS5 will end up selling less consoles then PS4.

The sales will begin to take a nosedive as many ps5 owners are gradually realizing that this generation does not have many exclusives compared to previous generations. Sad to admit but this has been the worst playstation in terms of games.

There's no question that this is a good performance and one that their competitors must envy. PS5 business has been good and the metrics are going in the right direction, so those people who have invested in this eco-system will be well served and are unlikely to regret their purchase.
The narrative that 'there are no games' is absolute nonsense - I've never had a backlog so large and I've gamed as an adult in every single generation since the business started. Such views can only be offered by those who have little experience or have simply grown tired of gaming...

I think 2025 is gonna be a banger year thanks to GTA VI, Death Stranding 2 and new games that I hope to see in the next showcase.
Also i'm expecting to see many more Xbox games coming to PS5, such as Starfield

@Godot25 I'm going to assume that no one really uses that argument for series s|X consoles because for a considerable period of time you could go on Amazon and buy a series S or X console pretty easily while PS5 was still hard to come by, and even then it didn't really seem to boost the series console sales.

@Kevw2006 Series X shortages eased up maybe 2-3 months sooner than PS5 Series S was more available, that's true.

But it would be easy to say "If there was no shortages, Series X/S would sold as many consoles as Xbox One" like people are now claiming that if there was no shortages, PS5 would have outsold PS4.

So, reading this, the PS4 still hanging on by it's fingernails has impacted PS5 sales somewhat?

Doesn't surprise me. I only know one person who hasn't upgraded yet, but he mainly plays Fifa so hasn't seen the need. Although I think he's hoping he can swipe mine if/when I get a Pro... The cheap b@stard... 😂

There would have been more sales if they didn't do that much cross Gen games. I get they did that because of the shortages and the large install base of the PS4, but it made the PS5 less appealing to get for a lot of buyers.

@Arxagelos yeah that didn’t mean they were combining them with ps5 sales just that the portal wouldn’t be counted in the accessory category but instead console. Also that is Circana doing that not Sony

@Godot25 except the series x isn’t a desirable product which is why sales have absolutely,catastrophically cratered because there’s no demand

@Godot25
It is still in the ballpark of PS4. Half a million or a million more or less doesn't make a difference. Surpassing the PS4 would have been nice but no product or service can continue to grow eternally. As as long as it is successful business can go on happily. However, if the sales had crashed like Xbox One/Series X compared to 360 or Wii U compared to Wii then that would have been worrying.

I think they could have done better overall but they made decisions about cross generation games and GAAS games which reduced big AAA game production and the prices to me are high in the UK for time in the consoles life cycle.

Don’t get me wrong had original PS5 Day one and now have a slim digital now, so I’m supporting.

And on a SONY side note have just got a new X95L mini led 65 TV. So they doing ok out of me.

@get2sammyb Absolutely, despite the sorry state of the industry and the numerous questionable business practices, there has never been such a wide variety of fantastic games available, from the smallest one-person indie to the largest blockbusters.

Do people simply not look far enough?

@LN78 How does that make any sense

Original target was 25M then they cut down to 21M, right?
Selling 20.8M isn't bad if this is the case, it means you missed some opportunity that FY and not that your strategy was wrong.

They’re lucky to get to that seeing how poorly they’ve run the business.

Software sells hardware, not season passes.

@dark_knightmare2

Didn't see anything, in comparison Ragnarok or Spider-Man which was everywhere, buses, tv, cinema etc

Quick Google search shows no UK tv ads or cinema spots for SB, certainly no billboards I've seen either

But if they did fair enough

@Titntin or maybe to people who have a playstation only for exclusives and playing their 3d party elsewhere

@Godot25 There's less than a million units in it between PS5 and PS4 at the same stage in their lifecycle, that's why people are saying it could have sold the same if not for the stock issues. The key would is it could have, not that it would have. But given it's very close it's definitely a possibility. Are the Series consoles sales anywhere near the same ballpark as Xbox One sales were at the same stage? It they were then, yes, you could say the same thing. But if they are significantly lower then it would be quite a stretch.

Why are the software sales so mediocre though with 60 million users?

@Pistolega Always a good idea to draw conclusions from personal, anectodal evidence instead of the official financial results - which have to be correct or Sony would get into serious legal trouble - and then label something a failure.

Lol, the haters, mainly Xbox fans are trying too hard to spin this into something bad and it seems I ruffled some feathers with my comments from yesterday so how about I ruffle a few more. Xbox only managed about 800k on their last quarter lmao at this rate I doubt they even crack 40 million by the end of the generation. It's Xbone all over again, actually it's worse so no amount of Phil's begging is going to stop Satya from scrapping the hardware this time.

@Arxagelos
"or maybe to people who have a playstation only for exclusives and playing their 3d party elsewhere"
Three exclusives on PS released this year so far - how many on the 'other' console? Zero.
Nice try, doesn't withstand any scrutiny.

@Shad361 10-25M (or even less for some others) for their AAA games is a heck of a lot smaller than what Nintendo sells with their games (I think that Mario Kart 8 has sold over 60M units, Zelda and Animal Crossing not too far behind). It's not bad numbers, but there only looking at a certain amount of people.

Sony would kill for those numbers for some of their games to reach even 10M+.

Problem is that PlayStation only attracts the hardcore market, they don't cater to nearly enough of all audiences. Therefore also really limiting their sales to only a handful of people.

But I believe that Nintendo already might have that market locked down at this point. But again, I also don't think that Sony shouldn't try that since they have potential for smaller games like Astro.

Also, there is a bit of a pinch in terms of where people are putting their money right now. I think the success of Helldiver's 2, and it being $40, might have actually been a good move, if it were $70 at launch, it might've not been the breakout it is now.

@dark_knightmare2 Of course it'll get a price cut. I just finally bought my own ps5 slim 😭😭

@Titntin No, @Arxagelos is right. That's the situation for me anecdotally where PS is my exclusives box, and belated XVI is really the main thing on PS for me this year, Ronin and SB are low, low priority backlog. My PS would barely have been touched were it not for VR which keeps it front and center otherwise, but most people aren't on the VR side. Lots of great games from third parties this year, but multi-platform owners that buy for exclusives specifically had a bad year. Even Nintendo is running on fumes.

@Shad361 That's the thing. The supply shortage years made PS5 desirable. Very desirable. It was obvious loads of people were buying them just because they could, because it was the in thing to buy, not because they actually play games, so I expect some of the hardware sold during those years is sitting there gathering dust. I think that's inflating the software sales expectations by making the install base look larger than the actual active install base.

I figure there's also a percentage of players that bought to subscribe to Plus Extra/Premium and don't buy much software outside the sub, like with Game Pass.

And the other is the changing nature of how people buy games, where a lot of people are just buying hardware to play Fortnite but prettier (or GTA, or insert other life-sucking individual game.) That's a big challenge for the industry and it's made hardware metrics broken. You can sell a lot of console hardware, and it can help your subscriptions sales boost for paid online ,but still suffer in the only real money maker, software, because they people buying your console don't actually buy games they just play one or two service games forever and ever. Which makes up more of the market every year. Heck the success of Helldivers likely means that other $70 games lost potential customers because everyone's happy enough with $40 Helldivers and don't need more than that. It goes back to EA saying "single player is dead" long ago. It wasn't for a while, but it seems money-wise, they may still be right.

The financials said they expect "static revenue but increasing profits." Meaning they completely expect flatlining sales and don't expect to change that, and will make up for it with cost-cutting (more layoffs, real estate sales, etc.)

You read all sorts of takes nowadays, but the idea that supply chain shortage actually helped the PS5 is certainly a curious one. The only people for whom the shortages made it more desirable were the scalpers, not the end users, but those consoles still eventually ended up in player homes.

@Ainu20 it happens in the sneaker market all the time with “exclusive” shoes. PS5 was like the iPhone of the console world. A lot of people impulse bought it honestly. All the celebrities like Lebron and Travis Scott had and promoted it, all the streamers promoted it.

It was hard to get, but sold for 2x to break even for about 2.5 years. So even if you didn’t really care that much, it was basically free profit to get it anyway.

@NEStalgia No, no he is not and you are wrong. This conversation was about the statement that there are 'no games'. Not Exclusives, and certainly not 'exclusives that NESaligia might choose to play' just no games. That was the conversation.
The fact he tried to turn it into exclusives is almost as irrelevant as you agreeing with him - there are loads of games, and I also pointed out that even if we were talking exclusives, in the first 5 months PS has more than the other platform too.
If you reserve your machine for exclusives only, that's your look out, you can hardly decry 'there are no games if you choose to consume them all elsewhere. As you said yourself 'there are loads of great games'.

I dont state that Xbox has no games, despite the fact my Xbox has been gathering dust since last september, as there are loads of great games if I choose to play them there - I just don't.
Please read context before replying. #25 & #26

the read on this, is that now that they stopped selling the consoles on a discount, they started having a more healthy operating margin, o about 10% of their revenue, which continue to increase year on year.

@Titntin Yea the thing this gen has made clear is that exclusive games are not why people are choosing one console over another. Most people play 1 or 2 games a year and they are multiplat or free-to-play games. The whole “Xbox/playstation has no games!” Does not even enter the majority of consumers minds. The value proposition of each console is tied to many many factors. At the beginning of the generation I thought Xbox was going to be on pace with PS and maybe even overtake it due to gamepass day and date promise, but that doesn’t even appeal to most people as they would never play those games anyways. Gamepass wasn’t a system seller, and ended up devaluing the platform because people just generally don’t consume games like this.

As for the “no games” argument people must be playing as a full time job because I can not keep up.

I will be selling my Digital PS5 and getting a PS5 Pro so i am giving them my time and money. I also have the Dual Sense Edge and the H9 Inzone headphones. Now i just need a few killer titles from the 1st party and it should be smooth sailing until PS6.

@Titntin Right, I think we're basically agreeing, I was talking in that context, that middle paragraph, I was replying to the part about it being "no games" for if you're buying a console for the exclusives, and my point wasn't PS specific, my point is for multi-plat gamers that buy platforms specifically for the exclusives, all 3 are going to be a disappointment for that use right now. None of them are really doing much in the way of big exclusives that is the reason someone buying a console for the exclusives only will be happy with it. I think that's the point he was trying to make and I think that point is accurate.

Not a knock on any platform, but acknowledgement that that's where I think a lot of complaints from all the people saying "no games" are coming from. People who are primarily playing PC or Nintendo and buy a PS for the exclusives don't have much going on with it right now. (Or primarily Xbox but there's like 10 of us.) That's where the "no games" complaints are coming from.

And that also highlights some of Sony's financial woes with software sales. Their model was for exclusives to attract people to build their whole library on PS. Instead they've attracted a lot of customers, probably mostly PC customers, who were trained to buy a PS just to buy those handful of exclusives, which isn't really a customer that makes them money.

In the post-exclusives age, console is going to be in a really weird place and there really won't be much reason to own multiple if PC is where it all goes.

There are loads of great games. On whatever platform is someone's primary. Therefore the "no games" comments are mostly coming from the faction that buys the platform ONLY for those exclusives. And that model has kind of severely broken the console platform business model.

Nintendo is somewhat different there, but even there, a lot of the exclusives have either been few and far in between and a lot of "exclusives" other than those few big Nintendo games are very small niche games.

For me, with XB as primary it's overflowing with games (as long as it still exists?), PS as my VR platform is kind of overflowing with games (but would be pretty dusty if not for VR), and it's my Switch that actually just gathers dust most of the time, with maybe 1 game, maaaaaybe 2 games a year on it .

I guess I'm happy the multi billion company is doing all right?

But damn what's happened to push squares' comments section recently. Its become filled with fighting, troll bait, and honestly a bit of tin foil hat theories lol. Can't we all just get along without blowing things out of proportion. I thought games and its relations were meant to be stress relieving not stress inducing.

Year over year increases are better than year over year declines. Xbox followed up a 30% decline in hardware sales with another 30% decline in hardware sales. That means the PS5 is most likely getting close to outselling it 3:1. It makes sense why Microsoft is looking at moving Xbox games to other consoles.

EDIT: Based on the numbers, it sounds like Sony has around 4.5 - 5 million PlayStations sitting on store shelves each quarter. They sold through 50 million by December 9 and shipped 4.5 million from January 1 to March 31, which leaves a 4.8 million gap to reach 59.3.

@Yozora146_ yea there is not much room for good faith discussions in any fandom anywhere. People can’t just enjoy things they have to argue constantly 🤣

@Godot25 In sum, the PS5 is slightly less successful than the massively successful PS4.

Got to love growth forecasts! Every home on the planet could have a PS5 and the suits would push for people to have a second 😂😂😂

@LN78 This!!! My PS3 is happily getting a 2nd lease of life thanks to this generation being so dull.

Sony making more profits! Better fire more employees.