Sony has now shipped 97.9 million PlayStation 5 consoles, and its finance chief says work on the next PlayStation is on schedule. Both points come from the financial results Sony released on November 5, as reported by Video Games Chronicle and Inven Global. We couldn't check Sony's original results documents directly, so the figures below are credited to the outlets reporting them.
Fewer consoles, more games
Inven Global reports that Sony shipped 2.6 million PS5s in the July to September quarter. That is 35% below the revised 4.0 million from the same quarter last year, though up from the 1.6 million shipped in the April to June quarter. Inven Global also points out that these are sell-in numbers, meaning units shipped to retailers rather than bought by players.
Software went the other way. Inven Global puts combined PS4 and PS5 full-game sales at 88.2 million units for the quarter, up from 80.3 million a year earlier. Sony's own first-party titles rose from 6.3 million to 8.2 million.
Gematsu's rundown of the results adds that 78 percent of full-game software sales in the quarter were digital downloads, and that PlayStation Network had 127 million monthly active users as of September 30, up eight million on a year earlier. VGC describes that user count as a record for the month of September.
Wolverine passes 2.4 million
Marvel's Wolverine, the Insomniac Games action-adventure exclusive to PS5, has reached 2.4 million copies. Inven Global reports that this is Sony Interactive Entertainment's estimate of copies sold to consumers worldwide as of November 4, covering the 50 days after the game's September 15 US launch and excluding add-on content.
That makes it a different kind of number from the console total. The hardware figure counts what Sony shipped to shops, while the Wolverine figure estimates what players actually bought.
What Sony said about PS6
VGC reports that CFO Lin Tao said development of the next PlayStation is "progressing as scheduled" during the company's web call. "Although new PS5 unit sales are gradually declining as expected at this stage of the console life cycle, the PlayStation platform continues to expand and grow in a stable manner," Tao said, according to VGC. Tao added that Sony intends "to make solid progress in preparing for the next-generation platform" in the fiscal year that starts in April 2027.
There is still no date. VGC notes that CEO Hiroki Totoki said earlier this year that Sony had yet to decide on a PlayStation 6 release date.
Memory prices are the other thread running through these results. VGC reports that Sony says it has offset higher component costs through pricing, promotions and further cost cuts, and that it expects hardware profitability to stay on par with last fiscal year. Sony also says it has aligned with suppliers on the memory it needs for projected unit sales next fiscal year.
The outlook improved too. VGC reports that games sales rose 9% year on year and that Sony raised both its sales and operating income forecasts for the division, crediting third-party games, notably GTA 6, along with first-party titles and cost improvements.
Mason's take: The 35% drop looks ugly on its own, but I think it's the least interesting number here. Sony is selling far fewer boxes than a year ago and still lifting its forecast, which tells you where this business now makes its money: games, digital sales and an audience that's already in the door. My read is that the roughly 2.1 million consoles left before 100 million will matter mostly as a headline. The harder question is what happens to that model when the next console has to be sold at today's memory prices.
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