As part of the details Sony Interactive Entertainment’s recent earnings call that came out yesterday, the company shared some sales numbers for the PS5. While these figures didn’t meet Sony’s lofty goals and are expected to keep declining going forwards, according to a estimates from an industry analytics firm, the console may have outdone Xbox’s Series X/S sales-wise in the last business quarter.
These estimates come from games industry sales tracker Niko Partners, with its director of research & insights Daniel Ahmad having tweeted as part of a thread of takeaways from Sony’s earnings call: “The PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in the last quarter. According to our estimates, this is almost 5x more than the Xbox Series X|S shipped in the same period.”
For a bit of context, Ahmad also pointed out in the thread that the PlayStation 5 has sold 59.2 million units across its total lifespan as of March 31 this year, with Q1 2024 – the period cited for the estimates above – only contering sales during the three month period running from January 1, 2024, to March 31 the same year.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that Microsoft doesn’t report concrete Xbox Series X/S console sales numbers, meaning that while the estimates for those being used here are coming from a trusted analyst, they’re not ‘official’ in the way that the PS5 figures are.
In its most recent earnings publication – released in late April – Microsoft revealed that Xbox’s gaming revenue overall had gone up year on year thanks to its acquistion of Activision Blizzard King, but that Xbox console sales for the quarter ending on March 31 this year were down by 31% compared to the previous year.
It’s also worth noting that the PS5’s lifetime sales are “slightly behind the PS4’s total of 60 million in the same time frame”, a fact which helps explain why Sony didn’t exactly crack open the champagne about its hardware numbers in that earnings call.
As Ahmad put it: “In other words, while console hardware sales are healthy, Sony is unable to sell more than the prior gen.”
Competitors outselling Xbox on the console front isn’t exactly a new trend either, with Phil Spencer having said last year that, after having “lost the worst generation to lose” with the Xbox One, the company is “not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo”.
In other news to come out of PlayStation this week, the company has opted to permanently replace retired CEO Jim Ryan with two established Sony veterans who’ll look after different bits of the business.
