Sony’s PlayStation 4 console saw its sales decline significantly in the final three months of 2019 compared to the final three months of 2018.
If you missed the news earlier in the week, SIE CEO Jim Ryan announced at CES that the PS4 has sold 106 million units worldwide. If you do the math, that means that Sony sold just over 3 million PS4s in the last three months of 2019. That’s despite an aggressive Black Friday bundle with three games for $199 and PS4 Pro for $299.
Where do we get that number? Sony reported quarterly sales of 2.8 million at the end of the last financial quarter. This brought Sony’s total PS4 install base to 102.8 million units worldwide as of September 30. In order to reach the 106 million figure cited at CES, that means that the company sold approximately 3.2 million units in the final three months of the year (plus a few days in January).
While that might seem like a decent figure, it falls way short of the 8.1 million units that it sold in the same period in 2018. And it puts the company well shy of the 112.8 million PS4s that they expected to sell before the end of March 2020.
None of this is terribly surprising. The PS4 is entering its seventh year on the market this coming November. Sony has already announced that it will launch the PS5 in holiday 2020. They’ve also dropped nuggets about the upcoming console, such as haptic controller feedback, PS4 backward compatibility, and the PS5 logo.
So while the news of declining PS4 sales isn’t great for the company, it’s also not unexpected, given PS5’s fast approach. And there were some bright spots, such as 5 million PlayStation VR units sold and 38.8 million monthly active PlayStation Plus subscribers. The company also said that it has sold 1.15 billion PS4 games to date.
In other words, it has been a good run for the PS4. However, it’s coming to an end rather rapidly.
