According to Sony, 2.4 million PS5 consoles were sold in Q1. That’s down from the 3.3 million sold in Q1 of 2023, but that’s expected. As this generation of console trundles its 4th year on the market, sales are naturally going to drop. Overall sales of PlayStation 5 consoles is now up to 61.7 million, which puts it just a few hundred thousand behind the lifetime sales of the 1983 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES.)
For comparison, Nintendo sold around 2.1 million Switch consoles in its last quarter. Xbox doesn’t give out exact numbers, but we do know their hardware sales dropped 42% from the previous quarter.
It’s important to remember that the PS5 still hasn’t had a permanent price-drop yet, so Sony could still boost sales.
Software sales were up nearly 20% over last year, equating to $3.3 billion in revenue for the G&NS segment. Add-on sales were a huge part of that, up 37%. Overall, 56.5 million PlayStation games were sold during Q1. Of those, 80% were digital.
The PlayStation Network’s total active users are up too, although Sony does not provide a proper breakdown of how many subscribers each tier has. PSN has 116 million active users currently, compared to the 108 million from this time last year. Q4 of 2023 also had 118 million, so the number has stayed static.
Given that number and the total PS5 sales, we can extrapolate that 56.3 million users come from PS4s and other Sony hardware. Sony has previously confirmed that 49m active users were playing on PS4. The math doesn’t quite add up though, since it seems unlikely another 7m users have picked up PS4s or even older machines and signed up to the PSN.
To wrap it all up, Sony is looking good. The gaming division’s operating income is up 32% overall, despite a pretty quite year for the console in terms of games. Due to this, Sony has upped its 2024 forecast by another 3%. The decline in hardware is perhaps a tad sharper than Sony would like, but still well within what would be expected.