Sony hasn’t really missed a beat in its transition from the PS4 to the PS5 where hardware sales are concerned, with the company’s current-gen console consistently selling solid numbers, and though it’s highly unlikely that it will manage to beat the PS2’s lifetime sales total of 160 million units, outgoing PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says that the PS5 is still very much on track to become the company’s “most successful console ever” by other metrics.
Ahead of his departure from the company, Ryan looked back on his career at PlayStation in a chat with the official PlayStation Blog, and when speaking about the state that he is leaving the company in, he had a lot of positive things to say.
“I’d say right now we’re at the top of our game,” he said (transcription via VGC). “We’ve been really clear and really consistent about what we stand for great consoles, great console gaming experience, and great games. I would say that right now we’re at the top of our game.
“PlayStation 5 is well on track to be our most successful console ever across multiple vectors and I think the games and the gaming experiences you see on PlayStation 5, led by PlayStation Studios, are the best that we’ve ever seen. The number of games we’ve published so far on PlayStation 5 at this point in the cycle, way exceeds anything that we’ve ever done before.”
Ryan did not go into detail on which vectors Sony is looking at when it projects the PS5 to become its most successful console ever.
As of December 31, 2023, the PlayStation 5 has sold 54.8 million units worldwide. Though its sales have certainly been impressive, they’ve failed to match Sony’s projections. The company was, for instance, expecting to ship 25 million units of the console in the FY 2023-24, but at the end of the October-December quarter, it slashed those projections to 21 million.
At the time, Sony Group president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki – who is also set to replace Ryan as Interim CEO of PlayStation – also said that PS5 sales were expected to slow down going forward.
Then again, leaks have insisted that Sony will release PS5 Pro model later this year, so the company may be projecting boosted sales in the coming months nonetheless.