PlayStation 5 it is probably the most requested console ever, partly thanks to its brand, now historic and synonymous with quality, and partly thanks to the size of the videogame industry that has never been so titanic. The periods of social isolation due to COVID-19 to which we have been subjected in the recent past have certainly also played a role. The same Sony defines this unprecedented question, and has shared a paper describing its great impact, comparing its findings to those of PlayStation 4.
PlayStation 5 sells in 80 minutes what the old-gen was selling on 9 days:
And we are not talking about any old-gen, but of PlayStation 4, which at the time gave excellent results and is still a console used by millions of users today. In the United States, sales of about 1,000 units per minute were recorded, or 80,000 sales in 82 minutes – in less than an hour and a half, the console sells when the old-gen did in nine days – a rate of 1,000 sales per minute versus one of about 6 every 60 seconds.
Excellent growth also on Chinese soil, a market that has always been extremely difficult for foreign products, especially if Western or Westernized (as is nowadays PlayStation, ed). China at the time of the old PlayStation 4 (2014) was at number 11 of the countries with the highest demand, now with the new generation it has risen to position number 6. In 2014 the old-gen sold under normal conditions 250,000 consoles on Chinese soil, PlayStation 5 in the same time (72 weeks, editor’s note) it sold 670,000 units and all this despite the problems of stocks and availability. There has also been a surge in average user spending per active unit: where previously we were talking about 69.81 dollars, today we are talking about 223,344.
Unfortunately for the company, this positive trend related to the first year on the market PlayStation 5 has overturned in the current fiscal year, where at the moment the console is weaker in terms of sales than the previous generation – Nothing to do with the quality of the product, but this is what happens when an industrial sector lacks fundamental stocks of materials essential first in order to even hope to satisfy such an enormous demand. We hope the situation is resolved, because it would be interesting to see what numbers could reach a console so coveted free from such limitations. We all keep our fingers crossed.