In its latest quarterly report, Sony has announced that the company has shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles worldwide in 2020. Between October-December, it had 114 million monthly active PSN users, and the total of PS4 and PS5 first-party titles sales topped 18.4 million copies.
Additionally, Sony confirmed that it is selling PS5 at a loss as there was a “loss resulting from strategic price points for PS5 hardware that were set lower than the manufacturing costs”. The company is also sure it is on track to reach 7.6 million PS5 sales by the end of March 2021.
PS5 first debuted on November 12, and a month later, DigiTimes reported that Sony had already shipped 3.4 million PS5. As a comparison, it is said that the company also shipped 4.5 million PS4 in its first two months. Nintendo sold 4.7 million Switch in five months. Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t publicly shared its consoles sales since 2015.
Even though Sony has shipped millions of PS5, the console remains hard to find ever since the pre-order period. Just four days ago, Yodobashi Camera, one of the biggest electronic chains in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan, was instantly flooded by fans over PS5 restock. The store was going to open a lottery to let only 200 selected customers buy the console. But after the crowd went wild and it turned into a small riot, the police were called, and Yodobashi Camera had to cancel its lottery.
In its quarterly report, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su noted that the demand for her company’s hardware “exceeded planning.” Hardware shortages will keep impacting the PC market as well as gaming consoles. This issue, she expects, may continue until the second half of 2021. AMD is the supplier of both PS5 and Xbox Series X’s custom CPU and GPU.
Scalpers are currently exploiting the PS5 sales shortage by reselling next-gen consoles with a high mark-up. Unofficial resellers such as SUP3R5 and Truly Exquisite also tried to take pre-orders for custom PS5 but were shut down by Sony. Well, I guess we will have to be patient at least until the third half of this year. Hopefully, by that time, we can get finally get our hands on these elusive next-gen consoles.
