PlayStation 2025 year in review: PS5 printed money during a quiet year
In contrast to its rivals Microsoft and Nintendo, it was a quiet year for Sony while it patiently awaits the arrival of GTA 6
Compared to the high drama of Xbox’s 2025, and Nintendo’s high-stakes launch of the Switch 2, things in PlayStation land were quiet this year — very quiet. Sony released few first-party games and made no big strategic moves. Like the rest of us, the marketers at PlayStation were forced to wait another year for Grand Theft Auto 6, the game that will define the PlayStation 5 and create an automatic financial bonanza for Sony. What to do in the meantime? Not much, it turns out. Sony sat on its hands, bided its time, and watched the money roll in.
It could have been so different. Sony has a longstanding, deep relationship with Rockstar Games, and the GTA and PlayStation brands are closely bound together in the public imagination. It would be reasonable to assume Sony and Rockstar have a marketing partnership planned for GTA 6, console bundles included. With no PC version planned at launch and Microsoft virtually giving up on its current generation of consoles, GTA 6 could be the closest thing to a Rockstar exclusive that PlayStation has seen in 20 years. It will be a massive, massive moment for PS5 that will see a big sales spike for the console as all the refuseniks still clinging to their PS4s finally upgrade — as well as a blitz of publicity, and a technical and creative inflection point for the console generation.
All of this was supposed to happen before the end of 2025. Then it was supposed to happen in May 2026. Now it’s scheduled for next November. Deferring all that buzz and income another year must be frustrating for Sony, but it’s not the platform-holder’s decision to make. And in a sense, it doesn’t matter. It’s coming anyway. The PS5 has spent five years already as a console-in-waiting, patiently anticipating the game that will make sense of it all. What’s another 12 months?
Image: Rockstar Games
This is especially true since its sales figures don’t seem to have suffered (though there’s an argument that, post-pandemic gaming boom, they should be better). Sony announced that it had sold 84.2 million PS5s through the end of September. The current console’s sales over time remain neck-and-neck with PlayStation 4, which made it to 117 million: fifth in the all-time rankings. There’s a strong argument that PS5 will outstrip its predecessor when the GTA bomb finally drops, as PS4 did not have the benefit of a brand-new release in that series. (GTA 5 first launched in 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360.) It also seems as though PS5 had a healthy sales bump in November from Sony’s timely and well-judged Black Friday discounts, which took some of the sting out of this year’s price increases.
Meanwhile, Sony has said PS5 is already its most financially successful PlayStation, having generated over $136 billion in sales. Some of this will be down to inflation, but it’s also surely down to more people spending more time and money playing games — while Sony’s main console rival, Xbox, picks the worst possible moment to vacate the field. On a macro level, Sony doesn’t care if all this spending comes from microtransactions in Fortnite and Roblox rather than full-price game purchases. It takes its 30% cut regardless. And if a big chunk of that comes from Battlefield 6 giving Microsoft’s Call of Duty a bloody nose — or, conversely, from Microsoft releasing one of the biggest PS5 hits of the year in the form of Forza Horizon 5 — well, that’s just the deliciously ironic icing on the cake.
Another key component of PlayStation’s quietly successful year was that Sony managed to get through the whole 12 months without major embarrassment — surely a priority after the abject humiliation of Concord’s shutdown in 2024. Two more marquee live-service projects, including a God of War spinoff, were stealthily shuttered at the start of the year. Sony’s much-derided push into live-service gaming may not be dead yet, but it certainly spent the year on hiatus. Perhaps fearing another Concord-style flameout, Sony acquisition Bungie delayed its ambitious extraction shooter Marathon into 2026, hopefully giving it a better chance to succeed. But Sony won’t be able to dodge every bullet in this brutal arena.
Image: Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment
It would be unfair to characterize Sony as sitting 2025 out altogether. The year saw two major first-party releases, Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yōtei. Both were opulent, cinematic action-adventures in the classic Sony mold. Neither disappointed, but neither set the world alight either. It says everything that these works of careful, luxurious craft landed 14 Game Awards nominations — and managed not a single win between them. They’re not the shot in the arm for the PlayStation brand that 2024’s Astro Bot was, even if they sold better.
The rest of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s release schedule was the model of a publisher marking time. There were PC ports. There were remasters. There was, whisper it, an Xbox port (of Helldivers 2). There were the video games Midnight Murder Club and Lost Soul Aside, which prior to researching this article I did not know existed, still less suspect were Sony games.
As a game publisher, Sony is particularly vulnerable to the shifting tectonics of the game business at the moment. It’s heavily invested in live service, which is a crapshoot, and in shiny AAA games, which are fast becoming so costly and time-consuming to make that they’re unsustainable. The sheer breadth and depth of Microsoft’s stable of game studios insure it against this; the same goes for Nintendo’s facility with smaller, AA productions. For Sony, a rethink might be overdue, but not before next year’s Marathon and Wolverine.
That’s a major reputational question for PlayStation. But it’s not an existential one. GTA 6 is coming — eventually — and the lion’s share of the home console market has fallen into Sony’s lap. PS5 prints money. All Sony has to do is ring it up.