Approximately 25% of all PS5 consoles in circulation have never been used.
How details from a specific trophy for an exclusive PS5 game unveils the number of consoles collecting dust.
After six months of being taunted by consoles sitting idle within scalpers’ inventories, I stopped being stubborn. I purchased my console at the premium cost — a markup of about 50% from the MSRP. After the purchase, my only regret was that I did not do it sooner. I have been a PlayStation fan for a very long time; since they entered the market with the PS1. According to Sony’s yearly player summaries, I’ve logged around 2000 hours of gaming on PS systems each year for the past three years, so it was a given that I was eager to purchase a PS5 as close to launch as possible.
I expected the current pandemic to affect production lines, and therefore I knew it was going to be hard to secure a preorder for the system. However, earlier in 2020, Sony sent a link to an “official preorder site” for players to express their interest in purchasing a PS5; all that was needed was to enter one piece of information — a Playstation Network ID. At that moment, there was a glimmer of hope — if Sony was going to use data from my PSN ID in the same way that most “loyalty programs” do, it felt like I would have an advantage in being chosen. While it was unclear which criteria Sony would use, I felt like I had all of the bases covered. Years of membership on PS services such as PlayStation Plus or PlayStation Now? Check. Total hours played? Check. Total spent on the PS store? Check.
Sony never clarified how they were going to make this selection, and at the end of the day, regardless of the criteria, I was not chosen. Perhaps I had unfairly assumed my “elite” status on the PSN, or maybe Sony had labeled me a sucker that was going to buy the system no matter how much they dragged me through the dirt. Indeed we could fantasize about many reasons, but truthfully, this may be giving Sony too much credit. Without any details from the source, the process was likely just a primitive lottery system, one that just made a random selection from those who had signed up.
As launch day came and went, I was still empty-handed, frustrated that scalpers had scooped up a large portion of the systems. The trend was unsettling — it is one thing for a person to acquire a single PS5 and decide to sell it, but it was clear that some people were part of a larger systematic initiative to buy out all the systems and drive up the price. Even though I could have easily justified almost any price for the PS5, out of principle, I decided to hold off on my purchase; who was I to let someone take advantage of me! During the past few months, I had grown more irritated, pondering: “How many of these consoles are sitting around unopened and unused?” Is there any concrete data available that I might use to back into a reasonable answer to that question? Well, nearly 24 hours after I finally received my PS5, I found the answer to my question.
Calculating Active Consoles
Sony’s fourth-quarter financials, which cover January through March 2021, were recently published. The report details that Sony sold 3.3 million PS5 units worldwide during the quarter, and by adding this count to the launch quarter sales of 4.5 million, roughly 7.8 million PS5s have sold in total. Of course, this is as of early May 2021, meaning that under a linear assumption, we should expect that an additional 1–1.2 million PS5s have been sold in April, bringing the total closer to 8.9 million.
To figure out how many consoles were collecting dust in a corner waiting to be sold rather than being used by players, a “My PS4 Life” scenario would need to occur. If you’re unfamiliar with this event, you can find more information in this Reddit Thread. A quick explanation is that PS4 released personalized stats to players on their top games, explaining how many people had achieved a specific trophy. With this knowledge and the PS network’s achievement percentages, anyone could calculate the total players for any game by leveraging a simple formula:
While there has not been a widespread event like this for PS5 games, there currently exists a way to calculate the total number of users for one of the launch titles, Astro’s Playroom. Astro’s Playroom is specifically intriguing because not only is it arguably one of the top five exclusives currently available, but because it is included for free with every console. Sony wanted to prove the capabilities of the PS5 controller with this title, and, in my opinion, Astro’s Playroom did an exemplary job putting those features on display. However, PlayStation seemed to unveil something else during Astro’s Playroom — the total number of worldwide players interacting with the game. We can calculate this amount in a similar way to the “My PS4 Life” formula by looking at the percentage completion for a particular trophy for the game:
At the time of this writing, the percentage of people who had accomplished this achievement was 6.0%.
Now, of course, a percentage is meaningless unless we have an absolute number to go along with it; alas, Astro’s Playroom has a world ranking statistic that is publicly available. If your time is close enough to 7 minutes, you can browse up or down to find the cutoff for the trophy conditions. Unfortunately, the ranking system will only let you scroll +/- 1000 places from your current standing before resetting, but if you can get close enough to 7:00, as I was able to, you get the exact number of people who have met the requirements for the trophy.
Sadly, my screenshot isn’t the transition from 7:00.01 to 7:00.00 but instead 7:00.00 to 6:59.99, and given I have already improved upon my time, it is no longer an option to return to the 7-minute threshold through browsing. However, I had written down the number of people who achieved 7:00.00, which was only slightly more than what I was able to show in the screenshot: 349,095 players. If we pair this info with the trophy percentage, we can calculate the total number of players. Technically, due to rounding, the 6.0% represented in the trophy details could range from 5.95% to 6.05%. Using the formula above, we can calculate the range of total worldwide players for Astro’s Playroom:
Returning to our earlier approximation of total PS5s that Sony has distributed through April 2021, we can get a rough idea of what percentage of consoles have played Astro’s Playroom by dividing the range above by 8.9 million:
Now, let’s pause for a second; while we can get a pretty tight range on the number of players for the game itself, did we uncover something bigger? After all, given that Astro’s Playroom is one of the best exclusive games on PS5 and free, it isn’t too outlandish to expect that almost all PS5 owners have at least tried it. They would all be included in the worldwide player count and the trophy percentages. Does the worldwide player count for Astro’s Playroom represent the number of PS5 players altogether? Does this mean that roughly one out of three consoles are sitting around unused?
Adjusting for Assumptions
Of course, making a bold statement such as the one above requires several assumptions, so let’s dive into those:
#1: Everyone who owns a PS5 console has played Astro’s Playroom
The statement is optimistic and causes us to underestimate the usage of PS5 consoles, but to what degree? We need a decent way to approximate what percentage of users who own a PS5 have played Astro’s Playroom. Thankfully, PSNProfiles, a website that acts as a repository for trophy tracking and leaderboards, has some numbers to help us hone in on an approximation. While this site only contains a subset of PSN users, specifically those who have added their username to be tracked by the website, we should get a decent indicator by extrapolating percentages from here onto a wider audience. If we look at the PS5 leaderboards on the site, we can see that as of May 4th, 2021, 87,239 users have received at least one trophy on the PS5. If we combine that statistic with the number of Astro’s Playroom game owners, 73,960, we can see 18% more PSNProfiles users who have received a trophy for any game over those who have interacted with Astro’s Playroom. We can use this percentage to adjust our game-specific numbers to be a better representation at the console level.
If we scale our previous percentages by 1.18, our console usage numbers are approximately 77%. Note that there are a few additional assumptions baked into this calculation. The first is that the sample of users from PSNProfiles represents the entire population for this modifying statistic. While a selection effect is present in the type of user that PSNProfiles tracks, I would not expect those differences to affect the above calculation significantly. The second assumption is that receiving at least one trophy is an indicator that you’re using the console. Even though most people do not explicitly seek out trophies, almost all games have at least one very basic trophy indicating that you have completed a prologue, first mission, or something else trivial. Therefore, we should expect that if one has had a meaningful interaction at all with their PS5 console, they have naturally received at least one trophy.
#2: Every console is owned and used by a single person.
Another optimistic statement, but in contrast to the previous assumption, tends to overestimate the number of PS5 consoles in use. There are two layers to this assumption, the first being that a single person has only owned each PS5 console. Given the short timeline that the PS5 has been available, it is unlikely that most PS5s have gone through multiple hands. However, if two different people owned a console and both played Astro’s Playroom, our numerator has increased, but our denominator has remained the same. It is easiest to use an unrealistic example to demonstrate this point. If 6 million players passed around a single PS5 console to take their turn in playing the game, it would appear as if 6 million consoles were active instead of one. How might we approximate the number of multi-owner consoles? We could probably scour eBay to understand how many used consoles players have sold over the past few months in an attempt to size that audience, but it is unlikely that number would be accurate or make a sizable dent in our results thus far. However, in theory, we can adjust our original formula to accommodate those additional players:
The second layer is related to the first in that there are multiple users of the system, but ownership has not gone through numerous hands. Imagine a family that shares a console or a friend you play with locally because they haven’t had the chance to purchase a PS5. In these cases, multiple users will likely be signed into their PSN account at the same time to play co-op games such as Sackboy, Overcooked, or Call of Duty; the catch is that both users will receive trophies from the same console. Since Astro’s Playroom is a single-player game, it is more likely that the average number of players per console is low. However, due to other co-op games in nature, the numbers we took from PSNProfiles to make our previous adjustment likely overestimates the total number of people on the leaderboards who own a console. In a sense, we need to modify our original PSNProfiles ratio using the following:
While we do not have enough information to calculate this number explicitly, the denominator is likely more prominent than the numerator, and therefore, our original modification was too strong.
If we take the last three formulas detailed in the assumptions and combine them, we can get a more realistic approximation. Notice that “Average Astro’s Players Per Console” cancel each other out in the second and third ratios, and so we are left with:
Filling in the numbers we know or have a reasonable approximation on yields:
We are missing a single piece of information, the average number of players per active console. However, we can assume this range has a natural bound on the bottom at 1, which refers to the best-case scenario. In this scenario, each console has only one account attached to it, meaning that 23% of consoles are sitting around unused; this translates to roughly 2 million consoles. On the pessimistic side, we could take a stab at how many consoles are shared by multiple users; if we assumed that 1 out of 10 consoles have two users, then the average player count per console is 1.1. If we divide with this modifier, we get the result that 30% of consoles are sitting around unused, equating to 2.65 million consoles. While we could debate the exact number of players per console, it isn’t too drastic to assume that 2–3% of consoles are used by multiple accounts. Therefore, we arrive at our original statement that 25% of consoles are currently collecting dust.
Conclusion
There are multiple reasons this inefficiency could be occurring. Regardless of whether it is due to scalpers or just individuals who purchased a PS5 primarily as a status symbol, it had me thinking about how this impacts the bottom line for PlayStation. After all, other reports have recorded that Sony sells PS5 hardware at a loss, making it all the more vital for them to get consoles into the hands of real players. It had me returning to my original expectation for Sony offering direct preorders; surely, they had implemented some system that would reward loyalty. However, it appears that they didn’t have the proper infrastructure in place to support this level of interaction with their players.
Imagine if you could effectively sell consoles to the right people from the start, the ones that will support the system, purchase games, foster communities, and provide feedback for all the new features. I would like to believe that level of personalization would be a brilliant idea for PlayStation. Still, here we are, in a situation where everyone loses — or maybe I’m just salty.
Note that all formulas have been created by the Author.
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