Sony sold 4.5 million PS5s in 2020

The results of Sony for Q4 2020 continues to deliver some key information. We learn today that Sony sold no less than 4.5 million PS5s in 2020, a score that is certainly excellent … but which is absolutely identical to the score of the PS4 during its launch quarter. The projections which were counting on record figures will therefore be at their expense, but to the discharge of Sony, it should be remembered that this launch was disrupted by many outages of stocks, which were further aggravated during the month of January 2021.

At the same time, PS4 sales have logically collapsed by 77%, to 1.4 million units. Despite the stock-outs, the PlayStation branch achieved the best turnover in its history with $ 8.4 billion in revenue (+ 40%)! Operational profits also skyrocket (+ 50%), to $ 763.3 million. Sony notes, however, that the profits of PlayStation were dented by sales of the PS5, and explains that this is due to “Strategic prices for PS5 hardware that have been set at a level lower than manufacturing costs”.

The score of the PS5 will hardly be comparable to that of the Xbox Series X / S, for the simple reason that Microsoft no longer publishes the sales figures of its consoles. However, Phil spencer said a few weeks ago that the “traditional” gap between Xbox and PlayStation would have been reduced during this launch period, which early estimates seem to confirm. The latter oscillate between 2.5 and 2.8 million units sold (which roughly matches the results of the Xbox branch), which means that there would be a little less than 2 PS5 sold for 1 Xbox Series X / S.

Xbox would therefore do better than at the launch of the PS4 (compared to the Xbox One), with 4.5 million PS4 at launch against 1.7 million Xbox One (almost 3 PS4 sold against 1 Xbox One, or the same deviation only at the end of life of these consoles). Incidentally, the launch of the Series X / S would set a new record for Xbox, which is ultimately not the case for Sony.