PlayStation 5: Sony has now sold 50 million units since launch, overtakes Xbox One

On December 20, Sony announced in a press release that the PlayStation 5 had passed the 50 million unit sales milestone. This includes all sales of the console up to and including December 9th of the current year. The PS5 has been on the market for over three years now, having launched in November 2020.

Sony thanked all supporters and also announced that it is now entering the Christmas season with full stocks of PS5s so that anyone interested can get a model. At the beginning of sales, the console was often out of stock, which no longer seems to be the case.

However, the console is still behind a number of devices in the all-time best list, but also has number of consoles behind it. When looking at the total sales of all consoles until the end of September 2023, the PlayStation 5 has just overtaken the Super Nintendo (SNES), according to Statista. Sony will no doubt be pleased that competitor Microsoft only sold 24.65 million units of its Xbox and 'only' 24.19 million units of the Xbox X/S. According to these statistics, the most successful console is the PlayStation 2 with a total of 158.7 million units sold, closely followed by the Nintendo DS (154.2 million). The Nintendo Switch is currently in third place (131.03 million).

But the PlayStation 5 still has some time to go before its life cycle ends and could still move up a few more places. The Xbox One currently has around 60 million units sold. And according to Sony, demand is by no means decreasing; November was supposedly the month with the highest sales and interest is higher than ever thanks to current game hits such as Marvel's Spider-Man 2 or Baldur's Gate 3.