PS5 sales catch up to PS4 despite lack of exclusives over Christmas

To quote Homer Simpson, ‘The lesson is never try’ (Sony)

Despite so few first party exclusives in 2024, the PlayStation 5 has had a very successful Christmas, and is now performing almost as well as the PlayStation 4 did.

Considering Sony only managed to release two new PlayStation 5 exclusives from its own gaming studios in 2024 (and one of them isn’t even playable anymore), you’d be forgiven for assuming the console might be struggling at the moment.

And yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. At the same time as EA and Take-Two have shared their financial results, Sony has announced their third quarter earnings, which cover the months of October 2024 to December 2024.

It turns out it was their most successful Christmas period in the PlayStation 5’s whole lifecycle, even though no major console exclusives launched during that time. (Alas, Astro Bot didn’t sell nearly as well as it reviewed and it was released in early September.)

Altogether, 9.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles were sold during those three months, which is 16% more than the 8.2 million sold in the same period in 2023.

That’s especially impressive when you remember that Sony had Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 in 2023, to help push PlayStation 5 sales ahead of Christmas.

For the last three months of 2024, Sony had to rely almost entirely on third party support, with its only exclusives being the Until Dawn remake and the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster, both of which also launched on PC.

This brings the PlayStation 5’s total lifetime sales up to 75 million. That includes sales of the more powerful (and more expensive) PS5 Pro, which launched last year – although Sony hasn’t specified exactly how many PS5 Pros it’s sold.

While it’s nowhere close to matching the PlayStation 4’s lifetime sales (which were last recorded to be at 117.2 million), the PlayStation 5 is on track to catch up. At this point in the PlayStation 4’s life, it had sold 76.6 million units, so the two are almost neck and neck.

Could the PlayStation 5 eventually reach the 117 million sales mark? (Sony/ResetEra)

Sony adds that of all the people who purchased a PlayStation 5 during those three months, 42% of them were brand new PlayStation users, as evidenced by them creating fresh PlayStation Network accounts.

It’s not clear who these people are, but a sizeable proportion are likely to include disgruntled Xbox owners, given the collapse in hardware sales of Microsoft’s format.

All in all, it’s a very impressive showing for Sony and far better than its rivals. Nintendo’s holiday period was perfectly solid, but the company did admit Nintendo Switch sales were flagging faster than expected. Although that’s hardly surprising after eight years and with a successor on the horizon.

While this is all good news for Sony, it does risk discouraging the company from making any new efforts with its own internally developed games. For as much as some fans joke about how the PlayStation 5 doesn’t have any games (meaning first party exclusives), that clearly hasn’t deterred customers from buying one.

There are a lot of cool third party titles on the way, as evidenced by last night’s State of Play, but as far as exclusives go? Only Ghost Of Yōtei is on the 2025 release schedule (Death Stranding 2 is made by an external company), with Returnal successor Saros not out till 2026.

Insomniac’s Wolverine and various live service games remain no-shows, and the recent cancellation of live service games at Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio point to Sony frantically walking back its commitment to such projects.

So while more hardcore fans may criticise Sony for taking its foot off the pedal, in terms of releasing the kind of big name exclusives that seemed to make the PlayStation 4 a success, that hasn’t affected their sales at all.

In fact, because sales have increased on last year, instead of continuing to decline, it may even pause plans for the PlayStation 6 – which Sony may now consider not quite so urgent.

We wonder how many of those new users had always planned to get a PlayStation 5 but couldn’t acquire one yet (Sony/ResetEra)

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