The George Foreman grill, sorry… PlayStation 3, has now been outsold by the PS5 in the US. Sony’s newest machine has achieved this feat in a fraction under five years on sale (PS5 launched 12th November 2020).
Respected Circana analyst Mat Piscatella shared the piece of trivia on Bluesky, noting that the sales-overtake had happened during September’s sales period.
“September 2025 US video game data fun fact – The PlayStation 5 has now surpassed the PlaySt ation 3 in lifetime installed base,” Piscatella wrote. “So that’s cool.”
He didn’t share numbers – Circana charges for that sort of thing – but did mention in replies that PS5 sales are also ahead of PS4 on “a time-aligned basis” in the US, and have been for “a very long time”. “PS5 is ahead of PS4 by 4.6 percent,” he wrote.
As a reference point, Sony’s business website lists global lifetime PS4 sales at more than 113.5m (as of September 2020), lifetime PS3 sales at more than 87.4m (as of March 2017), and lifetime PS2 sales – the company’s best-selling machine – at more than 160m (as of March 2012). Given the dates attached to those counts, those figures have likely since changed.
Sony announced in its last financial report in August that PlayStation 5 had sold 80.3m units in total – a pace which has roughly been the same as PS4’s, on a like-for-like basis, for a while. The next batch of financial results is due 11th November.
However, Sony is expecting sales of PS5 to slow, both because it believes the console has passed its sales peak and, I expect, because of the challenging economic conditions and tariffs the market is facing. Console prices for this generation have never been higher.
It’s a strange footing to be on when thinking about planning the next generation of consoles. But as I found out recently, perhaps the role of the console is about to change.