During Sony’s Q2 2021 financial results, it was revealed that the company sold around 3.3 million PlayStation 5s from July through September bringing the console’s total sales to 13.4 million units.
This isn’t the first time Sony has revealed how many PlayStation 5 consoles they have sold, as the PlayStation brand revealed back in July that it sold over 10 million units. The news highlights that this is the second-highest quarterly sales for the PS5, which matches the numbers for Q4 2020 and trails behind Q3 2020s initial PS5 number of 4.5 million units. In addition to the updated number, Sony revealed it sold one million more PS5s to retailers compared to the previous three-month period. With 5.6 million PS5s sold during the first half of its 2021 fiscal year, Sony is still hoping to hit its 14.8 million unit goal by the end of March 2022. Although Sony has stated that the PlayStation 5 supply issues negatively impact sales.
According to the financial results for Q2 2021, the company’s entire gaming generated $5.68 billion USD in revenue which is a 27 percent increase year over year. Of that revenue, Sony saw an operating profit of $751 million USD, which is a 21 percent decrease year over year. A couple of reasons for the low profit may be because of PS4’s low sales, in which Sony sold just 200,000 units during the quarter, and the PS5 being sold at a loss.
Overall, the quarter is the third-best quarter since the launch of the PlayStation 5 which is thanks in part to hardware sales and rising sales of third-party titles. Speaking of which, 76.4 million games were bought in across PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 during the quarter of which third party games counted for 68.8 million, with first-party game content accounting for the remaining 7.6 million. Of the total game sales, digital purchases accounted for 62% which is the lowest since Q3 2020.
This tells us that the PS5 is outpacing Xbox who has sold 8 million Xbox Series X|S units, according to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad who also estimates that Xbox Game Pass has surpassed 20 million subscribers. Speaking of game services, PlayStation Plus subscriber numbers are now at a total of 47.2 million which is around a one million increase from last quarter and a 2.2 million increase year over year. While that’s up, the number of monthly active PlayStation Network users is down at 104 million users. The previous number from three quarters ago was 114 million which was back in the early days of the pandemic so it may hint pandemic conditions are improving to a point people don’t have enough time to game.
