PlayStation 5 passes 40M sales milestone

Sony announced today that the PlayStation 5 has passed a major milestone: As of today, it’s sold more than 40 million units since it launched in late 2020. The company added that the console now has a library of over 2,500 games, and that it achieved its milestones in spite of the “unprecedented challenges of COVID.”

Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan mentioned the PS5’s supply chain challenges in the announcement post. He said, “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.”

The company announced earlier this year that it was coming up on the 40 million mark — its earnings report from last April shows that the company had sold around 38 million consoles and the percentage of units sold was going up thanks to the mitigation of hardware issues.

That said, PlayStation software sales at the time had not seen quite such delightful numbers. Despite Ryan’s assertion that players have been “enjoying a selection of great games,” the last financial report showed that software sales had dipped by 3.5%. It remains to be seen if the new games launched on the console have made up those numbers.

Industry analyst Mat Piscatella of Circana said that, when comparing sales for comparable number of months on the market, the PS5 is tracking 3% above the PS4 and 83% above the PS3. To give a picture of the competition, Microsoft mentioned in a recent earnings report that Xbox hardware sales have dipped 13% in the last quarter compared with last year — but that it saw a 5% growth in third-party content and Xbox Game Pass revenue.