The PS5 has been incredibly successful for Sony. The next-gen console offered stunning graphics and lightning-fast SSD storage, a true upgrade. This led to a ton of interest. The company had targeted reaching 16 million units being produced by March 2022. It turns out they missed that target by a fair bit. The company reduced that projection to 14.8 million PS5s sold later in the year, and they still haven’t quite gotten there.
Sony has reduced the number of PlayStation 5 units it will produce in the coming months. According to a report from Bloomberg, the situation will likely only get worse, so Sony is trimming expectations. PS5 production output is expected to be cut before the holiday season.
The PS5, released a year ago, has been hard to find for the full duration of its time on the market, making it incredibly prone to scalping. The PlayStation 5 became the fastest Sony console to reach 10 million units sold this July. The record could have been further broken had COVID-19 and various supply chain issues not hamstrung production. Sony fully admits that their targets for sales have been compromised by these issues. And it’s not just consoles affected, Sony has noted that game sales have started to drift away from consoles and toward PC versions.
Major chip manufacturer TSMC projects that the underlying constraints on supply will be with us for some time. It’s very likely that game consoles, GPUs and other products will be hard-to-find until 2023 or later.
And it’s not just the console market feeling the squeeze. Steam Deck was recently delayed until Feb. 2022 on the back of the same supply issues.
It’s likely that Sony is trying to allow the market to better adjust by reducing their own demand, and cutting PS5 production, as a result. Sony still projects a target for selling 22.6 million PS5 consoles at some point, but they expect to miss that target. It’s just a question of by how much they will fall short. So far, 13.4 million consoles have been sold.