Sony Has Sold 40 Million PS5s (theverge.com) 44
Sony announced it has sold over 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles despite the "unprecedented challenges of COVID" and supply chain issues. From a report: Unlike the press release shared when the PS5 crossed 10 million units sold as of July 2021, Sony didn't call its flagship console out as the "fastest-selling console in the history of Sony Interactive Entertainment," reflecting a slower pace of sales even as supply issues ebbed. PlayStation 5 shipments have begun to ramp up this year. Sony nearly hit 40 million consoles sold earlier this year and tripled the number of consoles it shipped from January to March 2023 at 6.3 million units. At the same time last year, it shipped just 2 million PlayStation 5 consoles.
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Obligatory Peter meme
https://external-content.duckd... [duckduckgo.com]
Re:Counting my number of f**ks..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. You used up a fuck by posting. You could have just read the headline and skipped but clearly something about this interested you so much that you not only had its attention but felt the need to discuss it.
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shut the fuck up.
Oh you have fucks to spare? I thought you spent the last one on your stupid post.
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or did you just come running to insist on an old-ass pedantry that doesn't actually change the reality of the nothingburger
Yes.
Impulse-buying (Score:2)
I wanted one back when it was largely unavailable, for no good reason. Now, I see plenty stores having it in stock, and each time I am thinking about buying one, there's this nagging question I can't answer: "But why?"
Also, fuck exclusives. (That answers the "why not" question)
Re: Impulse-buying (Score:2)
Sony is even more unfriendly to customers than Microsoft or Nintendo. It's the last console you should consider buying.
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As I was saying, I don't need a console, of any kind. Not for objective reasons. It's more a matter of "I never had one, wonder how it is", combined with "I have large screen TVs, wonder how gaming would look like on them". So far, I successfully resisted what we call "brain midgets" around here :)
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I was like this about 6 years ago.
Previous console I had was 25 years ago, then got an xbox. And honestly, if you find a game you enjoy, it's great on a big screen on the couch.
The hard part is finding a game I enjoy...
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Now, I see plenty stores having it in stock, and each time I am thinking about buying one, there's this nagging question I can't answer: "But why?"
Where? Or do you mean available for purchase online? I've never seen one physically in stock, but I guess they're available for "in-store pickup," they just don't put any on the floor.
In any case, it's one of the things I've noticed, whenever I see a PS5 in a store, it's always a non-functional display model, and never has any stock on the floor you can buy or any signs telling you that they have any in the back or anything like that.
Although I've never bothered asking if they have them available, because m
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Where?
In my Eastern European country. Reputable seller, too, so no fakes or shenanigans. Stacked boxes of them. I pass by one of their stores at least twice a week.
Example:
https://altex.ro/consola-plays... [altex.ro]
I still believe consoles have their usage: It un-savvy people who want to casually play some games with friends, but don't bother setting up a gaming PC for that. But I'm not in that category.
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In my Eastern European country. Reputable seller, too, so no fakes or shenanigans. Stacked boxes of them. I pass by one of their stores at least twice a week.
I kind of figured it had to be outside the US. From what I can tell, US stores realized they could play obnoxious games with them when they were hard to find, and refused to stop now that they're not, ironically making them hard to find again.
Examples of "obnoxious games" include requiring you to have a paid subscription service with the store, bundling the console with accessories of extremely dubious quality, requiring a minimum purchase amount in addition to the console to quality for "free shipping" wit
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I realize I failed to describe the "wait list" in its entirety, because allowing you to back order the PS5 would have been nice. No, what companies were doing (including Sony themselves) were giving you a place where you can enter your email to sign up for a chance to get a PS5. How many chances were they giving out? Who knows, they didn't say. But what they did say (in the fine print) was that by signing up for a mere chance at a PS5, you were agreeing that they could use and sell your email address for ma
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The demand was way too high to have a manageable preorder system.
If you signed up for the chance, when they got more stock in they would randomly pick names from the wait list and email them an invite to order from the next batch. It mostly cut the scalpers out of the loop.
Giving Sony your email address is a non-issue because almost everyone buying one either already has a PlayStation Network account tied to their email address, or will be creating one as soon as they get the PS5. If you were buying it from
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I kind of figured it had to be outside the US.
I bought two of them online from Best Buy recently for my kids. I can't speak to whether they're out on the floor for two reasons:
1) I stay out of stores as much as I possibly can, and buy online to the extent that it's possible. I absolutely HATE going to stores to shop. If it's not online, I mostly don't bother with it.
2) Best Buy has turned mostly into an appliance showroom, so even when I went to pickup the PS5's, I didn't bother looking around.
On a slightly related subject: As someone else has pointed
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There are more than enough games out there, and I don't need to waste money on an oversized home console for a couple of exclusives. (Seriously, if you haven't seen the display models, that thing is HUGE.)
Have you seen how big modern graphics cards are? They've got massive cooling systems on them. CPU coolers tend to be big too. The PS5 is huge because you need a ton of cooling for modern gaming systems. The new Xbox is pretty big too - not as tall, but a lot thicker.
All of this makes me wonder something Sony almost certainly will never answer: how many people bought a PS5 early on when they were hard to get, knowing that if they didn't, they may not be able to get one later? And how many of those are now just sitting around unused?
Not directly answering your question, but back when they were really hard to find, the stats showed that the vast majority of people buying a PS5 already had a PS4. It made sense, as the PS5 runs PS4 games with improved performance. It's kind of a no brainer move to upgrade. All your old games transfer over and run better, and now you can run the new games.
Meanwhile, how many people who do play games were never able to get one, and now don't care to get one, because there's really no point? Or, to put it another way, how many of those "40 million PS5s sold" are going to translate into games sales, and how many are just going to sit around as proof someone was able to get something rare?
There's probably near zero people who feel that way. People buy game consoles because they like to play games. On older consoles with no back compatibility, you got a little bit of people rushing to buy it when they could, knowing that there would be games they want later. Now that the consoles run previous generation games better than the old consoles did, pretty much everyone buying them has games they want to play on it immediately.
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For me it's "But now all the games I wanted to play are also on Steam so there's no point."
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There were some exclusives (on consoles in general) which I had wanted to play, but as I already said, fuck exclusives.
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In my case, they were timed exclusives. As it turns out, an exclusive period of one year doesn't work very well when it takes me two years to get a console.
(In my defense, I didn't know it was a timed exclusive at the time. If I had, I would have just waited it out anyway. Lesson learned, do better research.)
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Ouch. Lesson learned, indeed :)
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"But why?"
It is more power efficient than a PC. IIRC, it draws 200W max. Whereas my video card alone can get up to 230W under full load. Also stays at 69C. Nice.
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Let me know when you can do with a PS5 everything you can do on a PC. Besides, if you already own a PC, buying a console is not financially efficient.
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Most people don't care about doing everything they can do on a PC with their PS5.
Then we should not compare apples to oranges.
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People are buying the PS5 to play games, not to do PC tasks.
Most people don't like to play games on a PC, as most people don't want to deal with the compatibility issues. Gaming on a PC is a miserable experience if you don't have a lot of patience for problem solving. They want their games to just work. And they want to be able to game online with their friends, who are also probably gaming on a console. And a PC that performs better than a PS5 isn't very cost effective unless you've got some other task tha
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Gaming on a PC is a miserable experience if you don't have a lot of patience for problem solving.
You really have to get out of the early 2000s mentality. Just saying...
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the compatibility issues.
What compatibility issues? Is you machine more capable than what is listed in the specs and do you have the storage? Its 4 things. Proc, RAM, GPU, Storage. The last even console gamers have to worry about.
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At what voltages? Voltage matters.
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How many if you include other suppliers? (Score:3)
40 million probably makes them the top supplier of PS5s, but I'm curious how smaller players are doing?
Personally, I've only sold like six. Bunch of work to make, and nothing but complaints since. If my experience is anything to go on, Sony must get a lot of angry letters/threatening messages.
Lovely... (Score:2)
I wonder how many they'd have sold by now if they hadn't played their noxious "Drive up the hype by limiting supply and making people go to annoying AF lengths to get ahold of one." game and manufactured enough supply to meet demand.
And no... they can't take a mulligan and write the fiasco off to a whoopsie or blame it on COVID. They had very nearly the exact same issue with (at least) the PS2, PS3, and PSP. For the shortage to be believable as merely a screwup, this would have to be the first time. Othe
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The supply issues are well documented. Products across the world were in short supply, not just game consoles. There is absolutely no good reason to make it hard for people to get the console because they make their money off the games. The console is sold barely above cost. Sony doesn't see a dime from the resellers that bumped the price up to crazy levels.
You believe in a conspiracy that is stupid.
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Sony generally reports sell-through, not sales to retailers.