Sony is still doing well with PS5, but its own games are not selling like they did near the end of the PS4 generation. According to financial data collected by Game File, PlayStation Studios game sales reached their recent peak in fiscal year 2020, from April 2020 to March 2021. During that period, Sony sold 58.4 million first-party games.
That year was huge for PlayStation. It had The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, along with the launch of PS5. Since then, the number has dropped a lot. By fiscal year 2024, PlayStation Studios sales fell to 28.9 million units. That is around half of the 2020 peak. In fiscal year 2025, there was a small recovery, with sales rising to 32.1 million units, helped by games like Ghost of Yotei and Astro Bot.
The drop does not mean the PS5 is failing. The console is still selling well, and PlayStation still earns a lot from third-party games, subscriptions, and its digital store. The real problem seems to be Sony’s own game production, as big games now take much longer to make. For example, studios like Naughty Dog have not released a completely new game since 2020.
Pricing may also be part of the problem. With the PS5, Sony raised many AAA games from $60 to $70. On the PS4, older games were often discounted to $10 or $20 after a while, and in the current generation, major games are not usually discounted as much, which may affect long-term sales. Sony also invested heavily in live-service games, but things haven’t gone smoothly. Some projects got canceled, and others, like Concord, became major failures, shutting down just two weeks after launch.
Nonetheless, yesterday’s State of Play showed some great games that will come to PS5 in the near future, including the next installment in the God of War series. So all eyes will be on how these games perform and whether Sony can bring PlayStation Studios sales closer to the strong numbers it had during the PS4 era.
