PS5 outselling Xbox Series X/S by 3:1

Sony’s PlayStation 5 console may be outselling Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S at a ratio of 3:1, new data estimates indicate.

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The Wall Street Journal recently put out a video that discusses Xbox’s current state in the games industry. The report included an interesting slide that provided sales estimates for the Xbox Series X/S duo from analyst firm Aldora Intelligence. The group puts Xbox’s gen 9 consoles at a combined 28.3 million, compared to the PlayStation 5’s confirmed 61.7 million.

If accurate, this represents a substantial 33.4 million gap between the two consoles. The PS5 could be beating the Xbox Series X/S by more units than Microsoft’s consoles have actually sold. The figures are meant to underline Microsoft’s underdog position in the hardware market–but make no mistake, Xbox is anything but small, and has even repeatedly beat Nintendo on a revenue basis pre-Activision acquisition. After the $70 billion Activision buyout, Xbox generated a record-breaking $21.5 billion in FY24, pushing closer against Sony’s earnings dominance.

These new figures from analyst firm Aldora Intelligence allow us to do a bit of math to get a rough estimate on the rate of sale of each system over a period of 12 months and beyond.

We can take Aldora’s estimates and match them up with the 21 million Xbox Series X/S sales figures that were revealed at the BIG Festival in 2023 to see how many consoles are being sold in a given time.

Now, before we look at the math, I want to preface by saying that there’s some caveats with the information.

1. We don’t actually know how many Xbox Series X/S consoles have been shipped or sold to consumers. These are estimates.
2. The timeframe is not like-for-like. I used a 14-month period for Xbox Series X/S (July 2023, when the BIG Festival numbers were revealed, carried over to the present month of September 2024)
3. As for the PlayStation 5’s timeframe, I am only able to use quarterly sales figures, which are laid out every 3 months; so I chose the last 4 quarters, which equates to 12 months of PS5 sales.

For the sake of this article, we will be using Aldora’s estimates.

Based on these trends, we can subtract Aldora’s figures (28.3 million) from the Xbox Series X/S figures from the BIG Festival (21 million) to get 7.3 million consoles potentially sold across a 14-month span.

Sony’s numbers are official and confirmed, and much easier to deal with. Across the last 12 months, ranging from July 2023 – July 2024 (which coincides with the Q2’23 – Q1’24 periods), Sony shipped 20 million PlayStation 5 consoles.

The ratio between these rates of sale across these timeframes is Sony’s PS5 outselling Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S by approximately 3:1.

Here’s an explanation of the math involved:

• Xbox sold 7.3 million units over 14 months
• Sony sold 20 million units over 12 months

First we establish units sold per month (in millions)

• 7.3/14 = 0.52 million units per month
• 20/12 = 1.667 million units per month

So Sony sold 1.667 million units to Xbox’s 0.52 million units (per month)

Expressed as a ratio, this is

1.667 : 0.52

Dividing both sides by 0.5, we obtain

3.334 : 1

Rounding to the nearest integer

3:1

Therefore, the ratio of millions of units sold per month by Sony versus Xbox is approximately

3:1