Sony's PlayStation 5 sales hit 50 million despite price hikes — more than twice the sales of Xbox X|S

News
By Anton Shilov
published

A new milestone for the popular console.

Sony
(Image credit: Sony)

A Sony executive told Reuters that the company's PlayStation 5 game console sales had hit 50 million units. This milestone comes three years after its launch in late 2020. Sony praised strong performance during Black Friday sales and touted how well the system continues to sell ahead of the holiday season.

Hitting 50 million sold-through units a little more than three years after the launch is impressive — for comparison, VGChartz estimates that life-to-date sales of Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S consoles have barely surpassed 25 million units.  

Meanwhile, the pace of PlayStation 5 sales is a bit slower than those of Sony's own PlayStation 2, which took around two years and four months to hit 50 million units following its launch in the U.S. and E.U. in October and November 2000, respectively (it launched in March 2000, in Japan). Nintendo's Wii also achieved its 50 million unit milestone around 2.5 years after its release.  

It should be noted that Sony set an ambitious goal to sell 25 million PlayStation 5 units this fiscal year alone (it started on April 21, 2023, and will end on March 31, 2024), so it was quite aggressive in promoting its consoles. By contrast, it doesn't look like Microsoft's prolonged acquisition of Activision — which attracted a lot of attention to the Xbox platform — helped the software giant much. 

"Given the momentum we've had in November and a lot of what we are seeing in December, just in general we are feeling very good about sales overall," said Eric Lempel, senior vice president for global marketing, sales and business operations at Sony Interactive Entertainment. "We have done some good promotions this year. I will say we've done fewer promotions at this stage of the lifecycle than we ever have in the history of the company." 

Interestingly, PlayStation 5 sales did not slow after the company hiked PS5 pricing in almost all regions except the USA in late October.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    and should come as no shock to anyone.

    Microsoft has accepted the XB is a PC stance and everything is basically "buy the game and play it on whichever you own" (and ppl already have a pc so dont buy the console as much)

    Meanwhile you have Sony and their kink for exclusive console specific games (like demon souls and bloodborne) where people can't play them on anything but the PS so they buy it.

    Exclusive games is why Sony sells so many consoles.

    its taken 3 yrs of sales to reach SNES sales & I honestly doubt the PS5 ever even reaches PS4 sales of 117M or so.
    Reply
  • ivan_vy
    hotaru251 said:
    and should come as no shock to anyone.

    Microsoft has accepted the XB is a PC stance and everything is basically "buy the game and play it on whichever you own" (and ppl already have a pc so dont buy the console as much)

    Meanwhile you have Sony and their kink for exclusive console specific games (like demon souls and bloodborne) where people can't play them on anything but the PS so they buy it.

    Exclusive games is why Sony sells so many consoles.

    its taken 3 yrs of sales to reach SNES sales & I honestly doubt the PS5 ever even reaches PS4 sales of 117M or so.
    remember pandemic, economic difficulties, problems at the supply chain, coexisting with PS4 (cross generational games) and the higher price than PS2 and Wii, still impressive numbers.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Should come as no surprise given the cost of GPUs alone these days.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    hotaru251 said:
    its taken 3 yrs of sales to reach SNES sales & I honestly doubt the PS5 ever even reaches PS4 sales of 117M or so.
    SNES over its entire release cycle never topped 50m unit sales. At 3 years it had barely topped 30m.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    edzieba said:
    SNES over its entire release cycle never topped 50m unit sales. At 3 years it had barely topped 30m.
    perhaps you should read your own source slower.

    "SNES: 49.10M"(in your source) is a lot more than "barely topped 30m"(your post claims)


    and i did say to reach SNES sales (which is true as its 49.1M to 50M)

    ivan_vy said:
    remember pandemic, economic difficulties, problems at the supply chain
    true, but then again they sold every single one they produced. (they didnt sit on shelves)
    ivan_vy said:
    and the higher price than PS2 and Wii, still impressive numbers.
    PS2 sold like it did primarily because it was a dvd player as well as gaming console & its price wasnt much greater than a dvd player at time so it was a great hybrid media/gaming purchase. (even if it wasnt a high quality dvd player most never actually bought a decent dvd player to realzie it)

    it is impressive just saying given the PS5 is unlikely to double its sales before next gen is released. (which would even then only put it at the og ps & wii sales)
    Reply
  • ivan_vy
    hotaru251 said:
    the PS5 is unlikely to double its sales before next gen is released. (which would even then only put it at the og ps & wii sales)
    maybe Sony won't care at much neither gamers now that Sony is releasing games on PC albeit just have to wait a year or so -no problem when there are hundreds of others games to play with- and the existence of PSNow/streaming that is rumored to play PS5 games, Sony goal is not selling subsidized consoles as with older generations but to make profit. See buying Bungie to learn GaaS and Naughty Dog killing TLoU online.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    hotaru251 said:
    perhaps you should read your own source slower.

    "SNES: 49.10M"(in your source) is a lot more than "barely topped 30m"(your post claims)
    My post was 'barely topped 30m in 3 years'. The graph is pretty clear: 32m sales 3 years in, and that's generously excluding the partial launch year (or it'd just be 21m).

    Before making complaints about reading comprehension, try reading first.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    ivan_vy said:
    gamers now that Sony is releasing games on PC albeit just have to wait a year or so
    but thats not true.

    Sony DOES keep console exclusives. Demon souls and bloodborne are the 2 that will always standout given they are great games and have never gotten a release anywhere else. (bloodborne is almost 9 yrs old next yr)

    ivan_vy said:
    the existence of PSNow/streaming that is rumored to play PS5 games,
    ya...they sold a device for hundreds of $ just to stream games, but you need the console still & its streaming...which has problems for many (from latency to wifi drop).
    ivan_vy said:
    Sony goal is not selling subsidized consoles as with older generations but to make profit.
    which relies on the console selling.

    Sony Interactive Entertainment is the console branch of Sony.

    To show how much console means to them just look at the hissy fit they threw to try prevent the AVB MS merger.

    Sony will not do what MS has done with gamepass.

    Sony knows they need exclusive titles to sell console to make their profit. Thats the primary reason they do all the "1 yr exclusivity" deals to capture the FOMO crowd who want to play it having to own a console.
    (people are show to value time over $ so market knows people more likely to spend now than wait a yr)
    Reply
  • ivan_vy
    hotaru251 said:
    but thats not true.

    Sony DOES keep console exclusives. Demon souls and bloodborne are the 2 that will always standout given they are great games and have never gotten a release anywhere else. (bloodborne is almost 9 yrs old next yr)


    ya...they sold a device for hundreds of $ just to stream games, but you need the console still & its streaming...which has problems for many (from latency to wifi drop).

    which relies on the console selling.

    Sony Interactive Entertainment is the console branch of Sony.

    To show how much console means to them just look at the hissy fit they threw to try prevent the AVB MS merger.

    Sony will not do what MS has done with gamepass.

    Sony knows they need exclusive titles to sell console to make their profit. Thats the primary reason they do all the "1 yr exclusivity" deals to capture the FOMO crowd who want to play it having to own a console.
    (people are show to value time over $ so market knows people more likely to spend now than wait a yr)
    Demon souls and Bloodborne fanbase might not big enough to justify the cost of porting.
    "Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan in a slideshow focused on PlayStation has revealed the sales for the PC versions of games that originally released on the PlayStation 4.
    Horizon: Zero Dawn has sold 2,398,000 on PC in about a year and a half, while God Of War (2018) has sold 971,000 units on PC in just two and a half months and Days Gone has sold 852,000 units on PC in about 10 months. The figures are as of March 2022.
    Horizon: Zero Dawn has generated $60 million revenue, God of War (2018) generated $26.2 million revenue, and Days Gone generated $22.6 million in revenue."
    https://www.vgchartz.com/article/453759/playstation-reveals-pc-sales-for-god-of-war-horizon-zero-dawn-and-days-gone/The PC games are to give them a longer trail than selling in console only, the 100+ million loyal userbase has been the more or less the same since PS2, PS3, PS4 they buy 5 or 6 games to make sustainable the consoles sold at loss; the rising cost of developing games are the primary concern and reason to open to PC market. PC gamers are not the primary target, console gamers are, PC ports is the second dip for sales to recoup after 100-200M dlls development cost spent.
    Reply