From Tom's Hardware: A Sony executive told Reuters that the company's PlayStation 5 game console sales had hit 50 million units. This milestone comes three years after its launch in late 2020. Sony praised strong performance during Black Friday sales and touted how well the system continues to sell ahead of the holiday season.
Hitting 50 million sold-through units a little more than three years after the launch is impressive — for comparison, VGChartz estimates that life-to-date sales of Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S consoles have barely surpassed 25 million units.
Meanwhile, the pace of PlayStation 5 sales is a bit slower than those of Sony's own PlayStation 2, which took around two years and four months to hit 50 million units following its launch in the U.S. and E.U. in October and November 2000, respectively (it launched in March 2000, in Japan). Nintendo's Wii also achieved its 50 million unit milestone around 2.5 years after its release.
It should be noted that Sony set an ambitious goal to sell 25 million PlayStation 5 units this fiscal year alone (it started on April 21, 2023, and will end on March 31, 2024), so it was quite aggressive in promoting its consoles. By contrast, it doesn't look like Microsoft's prolonged acquisition of Activision — which attracted a lot of attention to the Xbox platform — helped the software giant much.
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