Sony Reveals PlayStation 5 Has Surpassed 40 Million Units Sold

by Wesley LeBlanc on Jul 27, 2023 at 10:24 AM

Sony Interactive Entertainment has revealed the PlayStation 5 has surpassed 40 million units sold.

Sony launched the PS5 in November 2020, after revealing the console the year prior, and since then, more than 40 million consoles have been purchased by players. In February, the console maker announced it had shipped 32 million units in the PS5’s lifetime, which means in just five months, Sony has sold at least 8 million more consoles.

That’s a significant jump, especially given that it’s been somewhat of a quieter year for Sony so far. There’s no doubt the release of God of War Ragnarok last winter pushed PS5 sales, helping it reach that 32 million mark, but since then, the only first-party PlayStation release for PS5 has been Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC and MLB The Show 23. Horizon Call of the Mountain is also a first-party game released this year but it's exclusive to PSVR2.

However, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XVI last month exclusively on PS5, so while not a first-party game, it likely further pushed console sales. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which is getting its own special limited edition PS5 console bundle, will likely lead to more hardware sales as well.

SEI President and CEO Jim Ryan discusses this milestone marker for the PS5 in a new statement released today. Below is a portion of it:

“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.

With the support of PlayStation fans, we have reached a milestone of 40 million PS5 consoles sold through to gamers since launch [as of the week ending July 16, 2023]. Thank you so much to our community of gamers – without you this would have been an impossible task.”