Sony shipped 4.9 million PS5 consoles last quarter, posting huge growth

Strong results for PlayStation

Things are going very well for PlayStation, as 4.9 million PS5 units were sold in Q2 of FY 2024, which signals a significant growth both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter (3.3 million units sold in both categories). This is a record amount of shipped consoles for Sony in any second quarter and was revealed in the company's latest financial report.

Sony plans on selling 25 million units of the PS5 in the ongoing financial year. After these new numbers have been accounted for, the company has so far sold 8.2 million consoles in the first half of FY 2024, so it’s about a third of the way there with the holiday season coming up – Sony obviously hopes for a strong showing in the ongoing quarter to reach its target. Historically, the company has been able to reach ambitious targets like this with a similar trajectory.

The PS5 refresh is expected to further boost console sales as well / Sony

PlayStation’s overall revenue is up by almost a third compared to the same time last year with a bit over $6.6 billion USD and an operating profit of around $339 million USD.

Sony Group overall is doing a bit worse compared to last year due to other divisions, such as financial services, going through some struggles, making PlayStation’s stellar performance all the more important for the corporation.

In terms of software sales, around a third of the 67.6 million PS4 and PS5 titles sold last quarter were sold in a physical form, the rest were digital sales, which is pretty in line with the ratio in the prior year (up a little bit) and quarter (down a little bit). At the same time, physical software sales only made up a meager 4% of income, compared to 21% for digital software – a good showcase of why it makes less and less sense for developers and publishers to offer physical games.

Hardware sales at 30% and add-on content at 23% were the only income sources more valuable than digital software sales.

A lack of first-party releases in the subject quarter meant that they contributed only around 7% of sales to the overall software sales, a historical low. Obviously, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will greatly change that statistic for the ongoing quarter, having already sold five million copies in ten days, but it definitely shows that PlayStation fans’ misgivings about the lack of new first-party games to play isn’t just empty moaning.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the fastest selling first-party game in PlayStation history