Sony brings PS4 production out of retirement to offset PS5 demand

Sony will continue manufacturing PlayStation 4 consoles to help buoy sales and offset dwindling PlayStation 5 supply.

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Sony originally planned to halt PS4 production in 2022. Due to chip shortages and restricted PS5 supply, Sony is keeping the aging PS4 alive for another year. Bloomberg reports that Sony will produce 1 million PS4s in 2022, presumably in calendar year, to help counter lower-than-expected hardware sales.

PS4 sales have dried up considerably over the past few quarters. In Q2'21, Sony shipped a paltry 200,000 PS4s, a figure representing a 87% decrease from the 1.5 million PS4s it shipped in Q2'20. Through FY21, Sony has shipped just 700,000 PS4 consoles to retailers as opposed to the 3.4 million PS4s it shipped in the same period a year ago.

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Sony had originally planned to slip right into PS5 production and slowly retire the PS4 over time. The PS5's backwards compatibility feature was designed to ease the transition between console generations, but hardware supply constraints have slowed this pace even further.

The company did acknowledge how important the PS4 is to its business, especially with a massive 116 million install base of monetized users.

Sony had also planned to ship more PlayStation consoles in FY2022 (April 2022 - March 2023) than any other period in the history of the company. The plan was to release a fusillade of PS5s onto the market to help integrate a new generation of hardware while also supporting the PS4 until at least calendar 2024.

"We're planning next year's PS5 availability to ensure FY2022 will represent the highest number of consoles that we've ever sold in PlayStation history," SIE President Jim Ryan told investors in May 2021.

Based on our estimates, Sony wanted total PS5 shipments to hit 23 million by FY2022.

It appears that strategy may have shifted and the PS4 could last even longer.