During the first quarter of 2023, Sony’s console has become the best-selling console in history. The Japanese company has recorded a total of 34.8 million consoles sold around the world since the launch of the PS5.
At this date, companies are presenting their financial reports. This means that the biggest video game companies are sharing with the world their data for the most recent quarter on record. Today, February 28, new information from Sony PlayStation has been released, where a great amount of data from the company has been revealed. However, the most relevant data have been the official figures for PlayStation 5 sold in the last quarter.
PS5 sets new sales record with an unprecedented start to the year
According to the multinational company’s fiscal report, during the first quarter of 2023, i.e., up to March 31, Sony sold 6.3 million PlayStation 5 consoles. This represents an increase of 4.3 million consoles compared to the number sold in the first quarter of 2022.
With these sales figures recorded during the first quarter, the PS5 has become the best-selling console ever in the year’s first quarter. Now, in the same financial report, you can see that the console is still selling at an impressive pace thanks to solving retailer availability issues. As a result, the total number of PS5s sold worldwide is 38.4 million.
On the other hand, if you put the numbers in perspective, you should know that the PS4 distributed 2.4 million units during the same time that the PS5 sold 6.3 million. Since the previous generation console had sold 40.2 million units simultaneously since its launch, PS5 has lagged. This is due to the company’s problems with retailer inventory after the console’s launch. However, PS5 sold 19.1 million consoles more than expected in 2022.
Same subscribers and fewer games
While console sales go from strength to strength, all other areas show stability. Without going too far, it can be seen that PlayStation Plus has the same number of subscribers as during the last quarter of last year, 47.7 million. On the other hand, there are 108 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, increasing by two million, the figure achieved in the last quarter of 2022.
In the first three months of 2023, PS4 and PS5 sold 68 million games on both systems. Unfortunately, this means that they sold 2.5 million fewer games than in the same period last year.
PlayStation’s own (first-party) titles accounted for 9.5 million sales, down from 14.5 million in Q1 2022, and 70% of these were digital downloads.