Sony has had an impressive start to the year as PS5 sales have dramatically increased compared to last January.
At the start of January, Sony announced that PlayStation 5 stock shortages were over and that it was now far easier to obtain one. Over a month later and it’s clear that it wasn’t exaggerating.
If you look at sales data for January, the PlayStation 5 has dominated markets across the UK, Europe, and the United States.
In the US, the PlayStation 5 is the top-selling hardware platform in both unit and dollar sales. Meanwhile, across all of Europe, PlayStation 5 sales are up by 202% compared to January 2022. No, that’s not a typo – they’ve more than tripled.
To be fair, the PlayStation 5 was in short supply last year, so sales in January 2021 would’ve been pretty low, but it’s clear that demanded has not dropped at all.
It also suggests that people haven’t been put off by the price increase, although Sony ensured there never was one in the US.
Even if you look at just the UK, PlayStation 5 sales are up by 98%, according to GamesIndustry.biz’s Chris Dring, with the majority of sales credited to bundles containing the console and God Of War Ragnarök, which launched in November.
Although The Last Of Us Part 1 saw sales spike as a result of the TV show’s success, Sony had no new first party games in January and so the increase in hardware sales was supported only by existing titles and new third party games such as EA’s Dead Space remake and Square Enix’s Forspoken – the latter being a PlayStation 5 console exclusive.
US NPD PREMIUM GAMES – January 2022 Top 20 Best-Sellers (Dollar Sales, Excludes DLC/MTX) pic.twitter.com/smtRVgNeQS
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) February 13, 2023
As for the Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X/S, Dring adds that sales for both were down across the board in January. Compared to January 2022, Switch sales in the UK dipped by 11% while Xbox sales went down by 32%.
In the US, analyst Mat Piscatella states that while the PlayStation 5 was top dog in unit and dollar sales, the Switch came second and that ‘Growth in PlayStation 5 and Switch hardware spending was offset by declines across other platforms.’ In other words, the Xbox has been underperforming.
This comes after a recent admission from Microsoft that its strategy of releasing games via the Xbox Game Pass service cannibalises traditional sales, something the company once denied was the case.
Although this can also be combined with the severe lack of prominent first party Xbox games. Its big winter 2022 releases – Starfield and Redfall – were delayed into the first half of 2023, with only the latter now sporting a definitive new release date.
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