PS5 hit another UK sales milestone, but it's not all good news

Sony has taken another marketing step forward with the PS5, but it's probably not what you expected. Despite an ongoing struggle with stockouts, Sony's next-gen console has overtaken the Nintendo 64 in lifetime sales in the UK. The PS5 is now closing the gap on the Game Boy Advance, however, it still lags behind the PS4.

According to GamesIndustry.biz director Christopher Dring, the PS5 isn’t the only console to outsell a previous Nintendo console. The Xbox Series X|S outsold the GameCube “just a few months ago.” Exact sales figures weren’t provided, though Dring believes that if console stock was more readily available “we’d ​​be looking at a major record here.”

The PS5 is now bigger than the N64 in the UK and closer to the GBA. The Xbox Series S/X overtook the GameCube a few months ago. If only there was more stock, we'd be looking at a serious record here. Long generation ahead April 5, 2022

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The latest official figures we received from Sony confirmed that as of December 31, 2021, 17,3 million PS5 units had shipped worldwide. That's a slower pace than PS4, which sold an additional three million units in the same time frame, though there's certainly no shortage of demand.

Thanks to the current global semiconductor crisis, we have seen widespread hardware shortages across all areas of the industry following the Covid-19 pandemic, which jointly affected Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and many others.

In February, Sony lowered its PS5 sales forecast in its fiscal third-quarter results. At the time, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki provided a new forecast for shipments of two million PS5 units between January and March 2022, a decrease of 1,3 million from 2021. Totoki believed that these shortages would last into next year, but said that the impact of the pandemic was about to fade.

By comparison, the Xbox Series X shortage may finally be over, as we’ve seen more units hitting digital and physical shelves in recent months. This is apparently due to an investment Microsoft made in April last year to prioritise chip production across multiple factories. The increased inventory helped the Xbox Series X|S outsell the PS5 in the UK in March.

Numbers are not everything

(Image credit: future)

When it comes to the N64, we still have a soft spot for Nintendo’s retro console decades later and on the Switch we’ve seen a recent resurgence. In October 2021, the Nintendo Switch Online service added N64 (and Sega Mega Drive) games under a new subscription plan, the Expansion Pack. Of course, emulation hasn’t always been perfect, but we’ve seen improvements in recent updates.

The game library started out with an early batch of classics like Star Fox 64, Super Mario 64, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo has added a game every month since then, with recent additions including Paper Mario, Majora's Mask, and F-Zero X. As confirmed today, the next title in the expansion pack is the original Mario Golf, which arrives April 15.