Sony recently released its Q3 report of the Financial Year 2020-2021 – and the results of the software sales on Playstation are at an all-time high. With one more quarter still remaining, Playstation has managed to sell over 275.6 million, as it can be seen from this table, and Sony’s first-party titles sold over 49.3 million copies so far.
Source: Sony
It is an unprecedented achievement as Sony managed to sell 50.6 million first-party titles in its last big year, which was 2018 (which saw the release of notable titles like Sony Santa Monica’s God of War and Insomniac’s Spider-Man) over the course of all the 4 quarters. The software sales in 2020 being this close to 2018 despite one quarter still remaining shows what a year it has been for Playstation.
With the way these sales are going, it won’t be far fetched to predict that Playstation will end up selling over 300 million titles when this financial year ends on March 31, 2021, and its first-party titles will be nearing the 70 million mark.
When it comes to the output of first-party titles, 2020 was arguably the best year for Sony. Their 2 big dog PS4 exclusives Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima did extremely well, and each one of them did the heavy lifting for the first and the second quarter of the year. Next, it was Spider-Man Miles Morales, which was a PS5 launch title that did incredible numbers selling more than 4 million copies in nearly 2 months, which makes it Sony’s fastest-selling game only behind The Last of Us Part 2, Spider-Man, and God Of War. And keep in mind that Miles is just a spin-off title. Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 is gonna shatter all records when it launches. It has solid chances of breaking the record of the fastest-selling first-party title, which is currently held by Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 (over 4 million in 3 days)
While these numbers are crazy high and nothing to be scoffed at, it remains to be seen can Playstation keep up the same momentum this year? 2020 was the year of a global pandemic and a new console launch, and it wouldn’t be a wrong guess to think that both of these factors played a major role in these sales. On paper, Sony does have 3 major exclusives: Ratchet Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Sequel coming out this year, and as soon as they fix their manufacturing woes, the PS5 is all but guaranteed to sell like hotcakes. So it looks like Sony’s set to have another record-breaking year. However, I have a strong feeling that due to the pandemic screwing up the development cycle of many studios, the God of War Sequel (which is touted to be Sony’s next biggest title) has a very chance of being delayed. But that remains to be seen.
