By: Nick Gambino
The PlayStation 5 was released at the height of the pandemic in November 2020 and so the highly anticipated successor to the popular PS4 limped off the starting line. Now, in just under three years, Sony has announced that they’ve finally sold over 40 million PS5s.
You might remember how hard it was to get your hands on the popular new console when it first came out. It became something of a meme and strangely this had the opposite effect one might expect in usual times. But these weren’t usual times.
We were all locked down in a global pandemic and so there was a kind of understanding when things were hard to get. As a result of the historically uncertain circumstances, the lack of units, owing to a limited supply chain, made the PS5 more valuable. You should have seen what people were charging for resale and what some people were willing to pay. Bunch of savages out there.
“For more months than I care to remember, we kept thanking our community for their patience while working through these issues,” Jim Ryan, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in a blog post announcing the milestone. “But now PS5 supply is well-stocked and we are seeing that pent up demand finally being met.”
Not only are they now stably stocked up on PS5s, Sony has tripled sales this year, a sure sign that the ship has been righted and things have generally returned to normal. 8 million of those 40 million consoles were sold in 2023 alone. For comparison, they only sold 2 million in the first few months of 2022.
It still has a ways to go before it catches up to the sales numbers of the PS4, but with a ton of new PS5-exclusive titles coming – like the much-awaited Spider Man 2 dropping in September – I bet we’re gonna see another big surge.
