Summary
Sony’s latest quarterly fiscal report reveals thatPlayStation 5sales numbers have declined year-over-year. Although thePS5has ranked high on global sales charts since its launch in late 2020, it seems the sales pace for the current-generation system has started to slow down.
During its February 2024 earnings call, Sony predicted the commercial drop-off and attributed it to thePS5 entering the latter stage of its lifecycle. This even led to the gaming giant scaling back its FY2025 (April 2024 to April 2025) sales forecast for the PS5 to 18 million units. For perspective, the PS5’s initial FY2024 (April 2023 to April 2024) sales projection was a lofty 25 million units, which was later slashed to 21 million units. Interestingly, PS5 shipments for FY2024 still fell short of the reduced forecast by roughly 200,000 units, which likely encouraged Sony to set a more reasonable target for the current financial year.
Sony’s Q1 FY2025 financial reporthas now been released, and it shows that the company sold2.4 million PS5units from April to June 2024. This translates to a27% dipcompared to the 3.3 million units the console sold in the first quarter of FY2024. However, it’s worth mentioning that2023 is considered a peak sales year for the PS5due to supply chain pipelines finally clearing up after two years and allowing for widespread availability of the current-gen machine. Therefore, a year-over-year sales decline was likely aligned with Sony’s expectations and doesn’t allude to a sharp drop in demand for the PS5.
Updated PS5 Lifetime Sales
By contrast, Microsoft recently announced thatXbox Series X/S sales were down 42%in the same timeframe, despite already being 31% down in the preceding quarter. Aside from quarterly sales figures, Sony’s Q1 FY2025 fiscal report revealed that the PS5 has exceeded 60 million lifetime sales, currently sitting at just over 61.7 million units. Moreover, Sony also recorded a monthly active user count of 116 million during this quarter, which is 7.5% higher than the 108 million users recorded last year. However, subtracting the PS5’s current sales numbers reveals that over 54 million PlayStation users are still on the PS4.
While the numbers are slowly skewing in favor of the PS5, the current-gen console’s rate of adoption is still slower compared to the PS4 on a time-aligned basis. Many players blame cross-generation games and the lack of blockbuster first-party exclusives for the PS5’s stunted adoption. However, with the highly-anticipatedGrand Theft Auto 6confirmed for a fall 2025 release, as well as Sony’s own pipeline of unannounced first-party titles, the company might just see an inverse bell curve for PS5 demand in the coming years.
