After selling over 58 million PlayStation games in 2020 alone, Sony has struggled to match those highs ever since.
While the PlayStation 5 has unambiguously crushed the Xbox Series X, a lot of that is due to Microsoft’s mishandling of the Xbox brand. As we said in our 2025 recap, Sony’s policy for the past several years has been to let everyone else make more mistakes than it.
That’s why despite the PlayStation 5 selling well, having crossed the 90 million mark earlier this year, there remains a sense that Sony has been fumbling this console generation too, especially after how successful the PlayStation 4 era was.
One common criticism has been Sony’s own output of first-party releases or lack thereof, and a new report has highlighted how that has impacted the company’s game sales, which have consistently dwindled since the launch of the PlayStation 5 in 2020.
This is according to Game File, which has collated Sony’s own sales data for all the games the company has published on consoles in the last six years. Specifically, it covers Sony’s fiscal years, starting from April 2020 to March 2026.
It also doesn’t just include sales of games developed by Sony’s in-house studios, but also ones from external studios that Sony published for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, such as Helldivers 2 and Rise Of The 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 the previous year.
Part of that can be attributed to everyone being in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, but it was also due to Sony’s own output. 2020 saw three major exclusives from among 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-gen launch for the PlayStation 5), which means they had a massive player-base to take advantage of.
In the following years, though, the sales of Sony published games have declined even with PlayStation 5 sales going up. By the end of Sony’s 2024 fiscal year, it had sold 28.9 million games, less than half of its 2020 sales total.
This is partially because Sony has simply had smaller release schedules since 2020, but also because each subsequent year has seen only one or two major exclusives.
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Additionally, a lot of Sony’s studios have been inconsistent with their releases. For instance, Sucker Punch didn’t have a new game ready until late 2025 and Naughty Dog hasn’t released anything new at all since 2020.
Insomniac has been the most consistent, having successfully launched new games in 2020, 2021, and 2023, and is set to launch its next project – Wolverine – this year.
There are multiple reasons for this. For starters, video games simply take much longer to make nowadays, but Sony also pivoted a number of its studios to work on live service games.
That obviously kept those studios busy from making any traditional single-player games and now a lot of those live service projects have been reportedly scrapped in the wake of Concord flopping.
Sony’s game sales have begun to climb again as it sold 32.1 million games in the 2025 fiscal year, though it still only had one first-party exclusive, Ghost Of Yōtei, and that number’s still less than what Sony sold in the pre-coronavirus years.
We’ll need to wait until this time next year to see if things keep improving. For the 2026 fiscal year, Sony so far only has two first-party exclusives – Wolverine and Saros – as well as fighting game Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls by Arc System Works.
This is also why there’s a lot of anticipation about the new State of Play airing tonight as it’s set to be over an hour long, suggesting Sony has a lot to show off.
Wolverine is confirmed to be there, but there are rumours and speculation of a new God Of War game making an appearance too.
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