Finally, data on the sales of the PlayStation 5 game console appeared on the Web, which makes it possible to understand how large the shortage of the console is. And now we can definitely say that the shortage is huge, because only in the first week of sales, 1,483,910 PlayStation 5 units were sold out! It should be recalled that at this time, the PlayStation 5 was sold in only six countries: the USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea.
The PlayStation 5 shortage is huge and sales data is shocking
It should be noted that, according to rumors, by the end of the year, Sony planned to produce only 6 million consoles – and a quarter of this volume sold out in just a few days. Later, however, there was evidence that the production plan was increased to 10 million PS5 by the end of the year, but the geography of sales has expanded significantly since November 19. In addition, in the USA, the entire demand for the PlayStation 5 is not yet satisfied, and indeed in many countries, there is now a shortage of the console.
How big the demand for the PlayStation 5 is, it is easy to understand from the sales of the Xbox Series X and Series S. During the first week, 1,345,386 of the latest Microsoft consoles of both versions were sold. This is truly the largest launch for the Xbox, with the last Xbox One record hitting 1.1 million in its first week. Keep in mind, however, that Xbox Series X and Series S went on sale in 40 countries, and in total fewer consoles were sold than PS5 in six countries.
Interestingly, not in all countries of the first wave of the PS5 was as popular as its predecessor. For example, in the US, Australia and New Zealand, the new console did outperform the PS4 in sales, but in South Korea, Singapore and, surprisingly, at home in Japan, the PS5 lost to the PS4 in sales in the early days.
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Sony PS5 Specs comparison with Microsoft Xbox Series X
| PlayStation 5 | Xbox Series X | |
| CPU | 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency, with SMT) |
8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT) |
| GPU | 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency) |
12.16 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz |
| GPU Architecture | Custom RDNA 2 w/ hardware RT support |
Custom RDNA 2 w/ hardware RT support |
| Memory | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 448GB/s | 10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s |
| Internal Storage | Custom 825GB NVMe SSD | 1TB Custom NVMe SSD |
| IO Throughput | 5.5GB/s (Raw), 8-9GB/s (Compressed) |
2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed) |
| Expandable Storage | NVMe SSD Slot | 1TB Expansion Card |
| External Storage | USB HDD Support | USB HDD Support |
| Optical Drive | 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive | 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive |
| HDMI | 2.1 (4K/120Hz, 8K, VRR) | 2.1 (4K/120Hz, 8K, VRR) |
| Backward compatibility | PlayStation 4 | Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One |
