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.
