There’s good and bad news for Sony as stock shortages for the PS5 finally come to an end but the price of making games cuts into profits.
The PlayStation 5 has hit another milestone, with Sony announcing that the official lifetime sales total is now exactly 25 million consoles. Microsoft don’t reveal sales figures for their hardware but the total for the Xbox Series X/S is thought to be around 18 million.
That’s a much smaller gap than it used to be, when the PlayStation 5 was outselling the Xbox by a factor of 2:1, with only 3.3 million PlayStation 5s shipped in the last three months. That makes for a total so far this financial year of just 5.7 million, despite Sony’s target for next March being 18 million.
Sony still think they can do that though and they’ve already manufactured 6.5 million consoles during the last three months, which is more than expected and, unless something else awful happens, effectively means the end of serious shortages.
If the stock situation is no longer a problem, the issue now is with how the global financial and energy crisis is putting a dampener on demand. In short, people still want a PlayStation 5 and its games, but they worry about how they can afford it.