PlayStation 5 Sells Over 40 Million Consoles

Sony has officially announced in a blog post that the PlayStation 5 has surpassed 40 million consoles sold.

As Sony states in the blog post:

"We launched PlayStation 5 in November 2020 and the world was in a strange and different place than when we announced the console in 2019. Despite the unprecedented challenges of COVID, our teams and our partners worked diligently to deliver PS5 on time. We continued to face headwinds with the pandemic, and it took months for supply chains to normalize so we could have the inventory to keep up with demand. For more months than I care to remember, we kept thanking our community for their patience while working through these issues. But now PS5 supply is well-stocked and we are seeing that pent up demand finally being met."

As Sony notes, the PS5 launched in a weird position. It was launched during the pandemic, which led to heavy issues with supply chains that caused console shortages for months. Some fans couldn't get their hands on a console until almost an entire year after the console had officially launched, meaning adoption was slower than expected by Sony. Now however, with this new figure, it appears that Sony has seen that issue come and go, leading to massive adoption of the next generation by people who originally couldn't due to reasons related to COVID.

The PlayStation 4, which was the fastest-selling PlayStation console to hit 40 million, achieved that milestone two months faster than the PlayStation 5, despite not facing anywhere near the same level of supply issues or delays, which might actually mean the PlayStation 5 stands a chance of being in the upper echelons of sales when it comes to consoles.