Sony has sold 61.7 million PlayStation 5 consoles to date, but sales are down year-on-year

Sony released its latest financial report for the quarter running from April to June 2024, and with 2.4 million sold, its lifetime sales total an impressive 61.7 million. However, PlayStation 5 console sales were down compared to the previous year, and the 61.7 million figure is lower than the PlayStation 4's lifetime sales at this point in its lifecycle.

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But even with fewer PS5 consoles sold than expected or predicted, this is still good news for Sony's Game & Network Services division, with revenues up 12% year over year. Sony sold over 53.6 million PlayStation games for the quarter, with 80% of these being digital. In addition, monthly active users for the PlayStation Network increased to 116 million compared to 108 million in the same period last year.

Outside of Sony's strong financial performance, even with PS5 sales slowing down, one of the big takeaways from this new report is the shift to digital sales for console gamers. With boxed physical game sales continuing to decline, 80% of all game sales tied to the PlayStation Store and PC platforms like Steam bodes well for Sony's digital future.

Sony isn't alone in experiencing lagging console sales, as Nintendo and Microsoft are experiencing sharper downturns in hardware sales. This is even affecting AMD's Radeon and graphics division, as the company makes both the CPU and GPU hardware for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. With 2.7 million PlayStation 5 consoles sold throughout the quarter, this is an 18% decline compared to last year's 3.3 million.

It'll be interesting to see if this momentum continues through the rest of the year and the holiday period, as Sony has very few high-profile PlayStation 5 exclusive games on track for a 2024 release. There's the hero shooter Concord, but that saw abysmal player counts during its recent beta periods, the fun-looking Astro Bot, and the Silent Hill 2 Remake. There's also the question of whether or not the rumored PlayStation 5 Pro console debuts later this year.