After selling over 58 million PlayStation games in 2020 alone, Sony has struggled to reach those levels ever since.
WHEREAS PlayStation 5 has clearly crushed the Xbox Series X, much of it due to Microsoft’s mishandling of Xbox brand. As we said in our 2025 roundupSony’s policy over the past few years has been to let everyone else make more mistakes than it has.
That’s why despite the PlayStation 5 selling well, it has exceeded the figure of 90 million At the beginning of this year, there is a feeling that Sony has hijacked this generation of the console as well, especially after the success the PlayStation 4 era it was.
A common criticism has been Sony’s own production of first-party releases, or lack thereof, and a new report has highlighted how this has affected the company’s game sales, which have been steadily declining since the launch of the PlayStation 5 in 2020.
This is according to Game filewhich has collected Sony’s own sales data for all the games the company has released on consoles in the last six years. Specifically, it covers Sony’s fiscal years starting from April 2020 to March 2026.
It also includes not only sales of games developed by Sony’s internal studios, but also those from external studios that Sony published for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, such as Helldivers 2 and The Rise of Ronin.
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Looking at the data, you can see that Sony had a strong 2020, selling 58.4 million games compared to 49.2 million games last year.
Part of this can be attributed to everyone being shut down due to coronavirus pandemic, but it was also due to Sony’s own production. 2020 saw three major franchises from Sony’s most prominent studios: The Last Of Us Part 2 by Naughty Dog, Ghost of Tsushima by Sucker Punch, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales by Insomniac Games.
Plus, these were all PlayStation 4 games (with Miles Morales being a cross-generation launch for the PlayStation 5), meaning they had a massive player base to tap into.
However, in subsequent years, sales of games published by Sony have declined even as sales of the PlayStation 5 have increased. By the end of Sony’s 2024 fiscal year, it had sold 28.9 million games, less than half of the 2020 total.
This is partly because Sony has simply had smaller release schedules since 2020, but also because each subsequent year has only seen one or two major exclusives.
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Additionally, many of Sony’s studios have not been consistent with their releases. For example, Sucker Punch didn’t have a new game ready until the end of 2025, and Naughty Dog hasn’t released anything new since 2020.
Insomniac has been more consistent, having successfully launched new games in 2020, 2021 and 2023, and is set to launch its next project – Wolverine – this year.
There are many reasons for this. For starters, video games just take a lot longer to make these days, but Sony also geared a number of its studios to work on live service games.
This obviously kept those studios busy making any traditional single player games and now many of those live service projects have been made said to have been removed IN after the fall of Concord.
Sony’s game sales are starting to grow again as it sold 32.1 million games in fiscal 2025, though it still only had one first-party exclusive, Ghost of Yōteiand that number is still less than what Sony sold in the years before the coronavirus
We’ll have to wait until this time next year to see if things continue to improve. For fiscal year 2026, Sony so far only has two first-party exclusives – Wolverine and saros – as well as the Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls fighting game from Arc System Works.
This is also why there is a lot of anticipation around New game state airs tonight as it’s set to run over an hour, suggesting Sony has a lot to show.
Wolverine is confirmed to be there, but there is rumors and speculations of one new god of war game appearing as well.
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