Sony has revealed how many PlayStation 5 units were sold in the first quarter of 2026, and the numbers do not exactly call for champagne. With the console family getting more expensive again and the memory situation still messy, it is hard to imagine hardware sales suddenly blasting upward.
According to Sony, 1.5 million PlayStation 5 units were sold in the first three months of 2026, up to March 31, though the company did not break down how many of those were PlayStation 5 Pro models, for example. That is not a lot, and it also represents a decline, as sales in the first three months of 2025 stood at 2.4 million units. In other words, Sony recorded a casual drop of around 900,000 units. During the same three-month period, a total of 74.6 million PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 games were sold, which is also down by 1.5 million compared to the 76.1 million recorded at the beginning of 2025. Of those, 5.8 million were first-party titles, which is another slight decrease from the 5.9 million reported in early 2025. The share of digital games, however, continued to grow: it was 80% on the PlayStation Store last year and has now reached 85%.
The PlayStation Network has 125 million monthly active users, which is only 1 million more than a year earlier. That is not exactly dramatic growth, and yes, the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers is not detailed here either, because that too has been neatly swept under the rug around the time of the price hikes. Is the truth so painful that they do not dare say clearly what is going on? That is rather sad.
Compared to the operating income result for fiscal year 2025, excluding one-time items, the operating income forecast for fiscal year 2026 is essentially flat year over year, which Sony attributes to increased investment in its next-generation platform. Excluding those factors, profit from the current business is expected to keep growing at a double-digit pace. Sony plans to base PlayStation 5 hardware sales in fiscal year 2026 on the volume of memory it can procure at reasonable prices, while expecting hardware profitability to remain essentially at the fiscal year 2025 level.
So, when is the next price hike coming? The console’s price has not decreased once in nearly six years. At this point, the PlayStation 5 is not just a console, but also a long-running pricing experiment where players pay and Sony watches how far the rope can stretch.
