PS5 in only 3 and half years has generated more Profit than PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 combined. 

Operating income-

PS5- 10 Billion in 3.5 years

PS4- 9 billion 

PS3- 4 billion (Loss)

PS2- 2 billion 

PS1- 3 billion 

Source- Sony Business segment meeting 2024

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:827c33c0-8c6e-413a-af55-6d2af8a4f1c4

PS1 till PS3 only made one billion. But well done on being as profitable as PS4 in such a short timeframe.

The sustainability of console gaming however took a deep punch this gen if sales for PS5 and Xbox won't recover. There is a good chance the combined sales of Xbox Series and PS5 will not even reach 150 million at this point.

This is certainly a good thing for Sony PlayStation, but one has to add the caveat profits got a good push with the weaker Yen vs. USD/EUR these last couple of years. Nintendo also profited greatly from this.

The caveat is this is simply operating profit and loss on the year. So R&D for PS3 cuts into PS2s profits. As does every successor console. The 2 consoles where this isn't reflected is the PS1 due to the start of the year tracking in 1994 despite the PS1 undergoing R&D since the late 80s or early 90s. And the PS5, because it is too early for significant R&D for the PS6.

Basically PS2,PS3,PS4 numbers look a lot worse compared to PS1 and PS5 than they should.

The PS3 had more sales combined than the PS1 and PS2 combined, but profitability simply wasn't there. A small part of that was R&D for PS4.

Good news for profits, bad news for innovative gaming. If the PS1-PS2 generation had some of the most innovative games ever, and you just blew it away in revenue, why would you waste your time creating innovative games, which is really hard? Gamers of today clearly are happy with the way things are, so you wouldn't... which sucks for me lol

I'm guessing those numbers are split by the timeframe associated with the generation making the PS4 gen $9B figure not for truly the PS4 hardware up to now, but the figure of profits for 2013-2020.
And with the PS4 proving to still be extremely strong a significant part of PS5 gen $10B profits must be related to PS4 hardware.

Edit: the document confirms it:

Its by years and most profitable years of "PS5" gen profits were in the first 2 years (Covid years) where most of the profits would have come from the PS4 hardware as PS5 was sold at a loss. Now that the support is down for PS4 the profits are also way down for 2022-2023 and this is despite it still having a strong leg.

Those number looks good at first but with analysis, they do display the current concerning trends in the industry that are leading Sony themselves to review its operation and bolster PC support. 

Good Catch. 2020/2021 Sony had trouble shipping PS5, so it's likely most profits came from the PS4 platform.

Numbers can always interpreted in different ways and Sony's leadership choose to attribute it to the PS5 generation to juice up morale.

Is there any way to know how much Sony is making from Steam support? I've been curious how much revenue they get via PC.

Makes sense. Every part of Sony’s business costs more than all previous generations.

Yes, and it's even more concerning given the fact Sony, in the same document, claims their users are still evenly split between Ps4 and Ps5 at 49m active users As of April 30, 2024.

This means that PS4 was likely leading in monthly active users in 2023, the last year of reported profitability. The PS5 can certainly be attributed with most 2023 profits but still, the PS4 was likely very substantial.

Also looking at 2023 the gap between revenue and profits has never been that huge since the early PS3 years, which means that substantial investments are required to keep the business running and that despite revenue and profits for 2020-2023 going up ROI is significantly down.