It’s not just you, the PlayStation 5 console generation really has chugged for Sony. A prolific period of first-party output that capped off the PS4’s lifecycle has given way to a more fallow season as Sony seemingly tries to get a handle on its studios’ longer development times and a failed live-service gambit that cannibalized years of development time on projects that were ultimately canceled or eventually flopped. Many fans have intuitively felt this malaise, but a new chart backs up the vibes with some actual data.
It was published yesterday by Stephen Totilo over at Game File and measures Sony’s total first-party game sales on its consoles since 2020 versus the overall number of games sold on those platforms. First-party game sales peaked in fiscal year 2020 at 58.4 million copies sold. That window of time included PS4 blockbusters like Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II, as well as launch games for the PS5 like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the Demon’s Souls remake. That number’s been going down every year since, except for the last one.
What changed during fiscal year 2025? Well, first of all, Sony was coming off the particularly dismal first-party output of the prior year in which the Concord debacle happened. While Astro Bot and Stellar Blade (published by Sony but externally developed) both performed well, games like Lego Horizon Adventures seemed to not do as well. Last year reversed that first-party performance trend with fresh open-world sequels like Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei. As a result, first-party sales actually went up last year, snapping a four-year losing streak.
NEW: Sony’s been selling millions fewer first-party games (developed and/or published) almost every year since 2020.
On the eve of a new State of Play, it’s clear Sony could use more hits
Growth in third-party game sales does not appear to be to blamehttps://t.co/CyR0O8mJj7
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) June 1, 2026
How does this compare to total game sales across the platforms? As you might expect, those peaked during the pandemic at a whopping 338 million copies sold. Things started trending downward after that but have been rebounding over the last couple of years. Sony is now closing in on that pandemic high after nearly 320 million games were sold last year. I expect that it will blow past the previous record after Grand Theft Auto VI drops this fall.
This captures the dual vibes facing many PS5 owners this console generation. While Sony overall has been killing it, that wider platform success has come despite a lack of any real identity for the company’s first-party output over the last couple of years. There have been great games from studios like Team Asobi and Sucker Punch, but nothing that feels quintessential to the PS5 era the way Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima helped define the PS4.
Part of that is incredibly long development times. Where games used to take three to four years to come out, and sequels were even quicker to turnaround, nowadays even games that borrow from their predecessors, like Ghost of Yotei, can take up to five years to make. The other part is a hard pivot to live-service gaming that led to ultimately ill-fated acquisitions and, aside from notable exceptions like Helldivers 2, a lot of stuff people just did not want to play. Will the PS5 benefit from pent-up projects at the end of its lifecycle? Probably. But the bigger question will be whether Sony can sustain that first-party momentum into the PS6 era rather than squander it again.
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