Analyst firm Ampere Analysis predicts that Sony will sell twice as many PlayStation 5 consoles as Microsoft, which will acquire Activision Blizzard…

One of Ampere’s analysts, Piers Harding-Rolls, shared his prediction for 2022 on Twitter. According to him, the PlayStation 5 (including the cheaper PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, which cuts out the Blu-ray drive) will sell eighteen million units this year. In contrast, the Xbox Series X (and Xbox Series S, which also omits the optical drive) will sell nine million units in 2022. So Sony will open the gap between itself and Redmond even wider.

But even this result will not be enough to take the lead: according to Harding-Rolls, although the availability of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series will slowly improve over the year, the two companies won’t catch up to Nintendo, because the Nintendo Switch will lead the market this year with 21 million sales. Demand for the Switch will be boosted by the Nintendo Switch OLED model, the version with a slightly larger (and different type of) display launched in October, and a LAN port on its dock.

Sony said back in July that the PlayStation 5 had become its fastest-selling console, reaching the ten million sales milestone a month faster than the PlayStation 4. (Except that the games industry is growing, so demand for hardware also continuously increases, so it’s not that big a number even with the shortages in the international supply chain and the omicron bursting in China.)

Sony is hopeful that it will reach its target by the end of March for the fiscal year that started last April (it wants to ship 14.8 million PlayStation 5s to stores, which would be the same as the PlayStation 4’s first full fiscal year…), but who knows what direction the pandemic will take. Sony is not going to catch up with Nintendo: the Switch, which has been on the market for almost five years, has sold at least 92.87 million units, and since this number was published in NOVEMBER, it would not be surprising if the big N celebrates 100 million units in its following report…

Source: VGC