PS5 Shoots Through 40 Million Sales, Tracking Slightly Behind PS4

PlayStation 5 has hit an impressive sales milestone, although the console is currently tracking slightly behind the PlayStation 4.

Sony announced it had sold 40 million PS5 consoles through to customers as of July 16. According to analysis from Ampere’s Piers Harding-Rolls, the PS5 reached 40 million at a slightly slower rate than its predecessor (PS4 hit 40 million two months earlier in its lifecycle). And the PS5 is currently tracking around a million consoles behind in terms of sell-through. PS4 remains the fastest-selling PlayStation ever.

However, according to Harding-Rolls, PS5 has enjoyed a strong sales performance in 2023 so far, buoyed by record-breaking shipments and a wave of pent-up demand for the previously hard-to-buy console. Sony has sold over nine million PS5s in the first half of 2023, 30% better than the peak PS4 comparative performance last generation.

“This pace of adoption is allowing Sony to close the adoption gap when compared to the previous console generation, making up for poor availability of the PS5 in its first two years on sale,” Harding-Rolls said.

“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.”

“We launched PS5 in November 2020 and the world was in a strange and different place than when we announced the console in 2019,” Sony boss Jim Ryan said. “Despite the unprecedented challenges of COVID, our teams and our partners worked diligently to deliver PS5 on time. We continued to face headwinds with the pandemic, and it took months for supply chains to normalize so we could have the inventory to keep up with demand. For more months than I care to remember, we kept thanking our community for their patience while working through these issues. But now PS5 supply is well-stocked and we are seeing that pent up demand finally being met.”

Ryan said there are now more than 2,500 PS5 games available. Upcoming PS5 exclusives include Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Marvel’s Wolverine from Insomniac, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth from Square Enix, and a Last of Us multiplayer game from Naughty Dog.

Microsoft does not announce Xbox Series X and S sales, although last month it mentioned both consoles had an accumulated userbase of over 21 million during a presentation at a games event in Brazil. Based on this data, PS5 is outselling Xbox Series X and S by roughly two-to-one.

Xbox Series X|S console sales are at 21M+ according to Microsoft at BIG Festival in Brazil.

Credit to @LucasTaves for this information. This is all part of an ID@Xbox presentation pic.twitter.com/cOYtQSfwxN

— John Welfare (@Welfare_JBP) June 29, 2023

Just this week, Xbox reported Q4 hardware revenue declines year-over-year of 13%. Xbox hardware sales were down 13% in Q2, and then down 30% in Q3.

During the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) versus Microsoft trial to determine the future of Xbox’s $69 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft claimed Xbox had officially “lost the console wars”.

“Xbox’s console has consistently ranked third (of three) behind PlayStation and Nintendo in sales,” Microsoft admitted in a court document. “In 2021, Xbox had a share of 16% while Nintendo and PlayStation had shares of [redacted] and [redacted], respectively. Likewise for console revenues and share of consoles currently in use by gamers (‘installed base’), Xbox trails with 21% while PlayStation and Nintendo have shares of [redacted] and [redacted], respectively.”

Another court document revealed Microsoft’s belief that Sony will release a PlayStation 5 Slim later this year priced $399.99, and that Sony’s Project Q, a handheld game streaming device that wirelessly connects to the PS5, will come in under $300. A PS5 Pro is also reportedly set for 2024.
For comparison’s sake, since its launch on March 3, 2017, the Nintendo Switch has sold over 125.62 million consoles worldwide.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].