The PlayStation 5 celebrates its fifth birthday with a nice surprise: sales are up, and PS5 shipments have topped 84.2m
Sony has shared its latest quarterly financial report, and it’s a big one: the PS5 has sold 84.2m units since its release in November 2020. Not a bad birthday present, that.
That means that a total of 3.9m PlayStation 5 units have shipped during the three months ended 30th September, 2025 (up 0.1m compared to the same figure in the last financial year). Per our last official update from Sony, the PlayStation 5 had sold 80.3m units, so – by all accounts – it’s been a solid period for the hardware.
That’s no doubt bolstered by the performance of games like Ghost of Yōtei, which managed to sell through 3.3m units in just one month, enjoying a far more successful launch period than Astro Bot at the same time last year.
Recently, we heard that the PS5 is performing very well – even better than the PS3 and its lifetime sales – and is ahead of the PS4’s sales on a ‘time-aligned basis’, too. But it’s not just hardware that is boosting Sony’s coffers; as of 30th September, 2025, there were 119 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, up three million from the same period in 2024.
Maybe that’s down to a couple of changes to the PS Plus service, a growing library of games, and more demand for online play ahead of the launch of Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, and Call of Duty Black Ops 7. Given the timing of the data – it cuts off at the end of September – it’s worth noting we won’t even be seeing the impact of the PS Portal updates and game streaming overhauls. I genuinely expect to see better hardware sales in the next report due to a renewed interest in the PS Portal.
As for software, the numbers are up there, too. PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 software (it’s grouped together in the report, interestingly enough) sold 80.3m units during the three months ended 30th September, 2025. That number is up a significant 2.6m from the same period the previous fiscal year (and makes the 3.3m units sold by Ghost of Yōtei look even more interesting, right?)
6.3m units – or about 5 percent of all sales – were first-party titles, an increase of 1m from the same period the previous fiscal year. And, depressingly for all you lovers of physical media out there, only 28 percent of those games were actually on-disc, with 72 percent of sales being digital-only. This is a consistent pattern for Sony and PlayStation.
Things are looking bright for the PS5. Assuming we’re getting towards the end of the console’s lifespan at this point, I expect the machine will go from strength-to-strength in the latter portion of its life, especially as we see Xbox flounder in the margins, with sales lagging behind even the troubled Xbox One pace.