The PlayStation 5 has now sold 40 million units as of July this year, Sony has announced. That’s a lot of consoles.
That sound of clinking you can hear in the background? That’s my dodgy central heating system rattling. But if you happened to be sitting in Sony’s offices right now, the clinking might be champagne glasses – or maybe cups of tea of coffee it’s the morning in Japan.
At any rate, the latest PlayStation 5 sales figures are certainly a cause for celebration at Sony. The Japanese firm has announced that it has managed to shift 40 million consoles as of 16 July 2023 – and of those, 8 million were sold in the months since February.
Those figures are all the more impressive given the world the PS5 emerged into – it launched in November 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic. Its resulting supply chain issues – specifically, a semiconductor chip shortage that affected the whole tech sector – greatly affected availability, with would-be customers struggling to get hold of a console for the first two years of the PS5’s life.
In fact, it wasn’t until January 2023 Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan that finally announced that the supply issues were over. “Everyone who wants a PS5 should have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally, starting from this point forward,” Ryan said at the time.
Ryan acknowledged those “unprecedented challenges” in a 27 July post on SIE’s website, which announced the new sales figures. “For more months than I care to remember, we kept thanking our community for their patience while working through these issues,” Ryan writes. “But now PS5 supply is well-stocked and we are seeing that pent up demand finally being met.
“With the support of PlayStation fans, we have reached a milestone of 40 million PS5 consoles sold through to gamers since launch. Thank you so much to our community of gamers – without you this would have been an impossible task.”
PlayStation 5’s latest sales figures emerge as pre-orders open for a Spider-Man 2 themed version of the console, out on 1 September.
