It’s now a year to the day that the ninth generation console according to Sony is “available”, but it must be said quickly: still absent from the shelves of stores, the PS5 continues to be desired. And this is not a priori about to change.
To shine as a zetetic, you must first have explained the expected results before being able to congratulate yourself. Sony was therefore not begged to remind no later that this summer its (very) ambitious goal: distribute 22.6 million PS5 at the end of March 2022, and thus benefit from a first year already superior to that recorded by the PS4 in its time. But that was obviously without counting on a shortage of semiconductors which has affected an entire industry for several months.
The source has dried up
Like all its competitors, Sony should thus revise its production target downwards, as the journalist of Bloomberg Takashi Mochizuki. In a new article, his guys reliable sources indicate that the Japanese manufacturer has reportedly abandoned its goal of distributing 16 million PS5s during the current fiscal year, to bring it down to 14.8 million units. As of September 30, this figure stood at 13.4 million consoles.
The news will not come as a surprise to many, since the declarations of these shortages are multiplying throughout the industry, and in parallel with the declarations of Microsoft and Nintendo on the matter, Sony had already anticipated this potential downward revision in the spring, by l ‘intermediary of its financial director:
I don’t think demand is calming down this year and while we secure a lot more devices and produce a lot more units of the PS5 next year, our supply will not be able to keep up with the demand.
Ho ho ho, happy shortage!
The launch of the PS5 had however started on the hats of wheels, since the console was in spite of its relative rarity managed to establish a record, by crossing more quickly than all the others the mark of the 10 million copies sold in the world.
If we obviously imagine the frustration of the manufacturer and some of the players, still unable to obtain the beast, this shortage which is part of the long term nonetheless validates a diversification strategy which should limit the damage. The future cross-generational releases of Horizon Forbidden West or God of War Raganarök will thus make it possible to sell games on two different consoles, and the announcements around the increasingly numerous PC ports of first-party games are certainly going in the same direction.
Nevertheless: with the approach of the end of the year holidays that we know to be particularly consumerist, Sony will necessarily have to sit on a few hundred thousand potential sales, while waiting for the storm to pass. Even if it means once again making the happiness of the scalpers? Absolutely. It is obviously no coincidence that the console does not (yet) appear in the sales store just launched by the Japanese giant:
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