+20 million if GTA VI comes out . They are going to pump those warehouses full of consoles for the 4th quarter now that Series broke down on the side of the road.

I think 14 million or less. We are now in the 6th year where sales are gonna dip. Looking at the 4th and 5th years for PS4 (2017-2018) and PS5 (2024-2025) they sold similar and had a similar dip, so I'm gonna guess the 6th year will be a similar dip in sales. PS4 did 14 million in year 6 (2019). That's how I came to 14 million or less for PS5. Also, I think a lot of people are overestimating how much GTA 6 will impact PS5 sales this year.

You think even without GTA it will sell more in 2026 than 2025? Why is that?

I could see it at about 17m, assuming GTA VI is still on track to release this year.

17.1M

I meant to say it would sell just as well as 2025 that is 18 million. 

In my opinion, vgchartz have undertracked PS5 numbers in Europe and Rest of the world. We'd get a clear picture on the 5th of Feb when Sony announces thier q3 results with official shipment data.

Why 18 million? A few reasons how they could achieve that.

-Stronger 1st party line up- Wolverine, Tokon and Saros

- More Aggressive Hardware promotions and Bundles (steeper than in 2025).

- More potential xbox and pc (due to higher ram prices) consumers jumping ship.

- Sony going all in on the Chinese market than ever before. 

Without GTA VI I would say 16M but with GTA VI I say 20M+

Actually I've calmed down. GTA will be huge but that uplift won't happen all in 6 weeks, it'll be spread over many months and even years. So I've revised that down to 17.5m with GTA which will be a crazy achievement for a system so late and expensive in its life.

Yeah I do think people should be careful not to get carried away with just one game. It's gonna be the biggest game launch of all time but games released that late in the life-span of a console basically never cause any notable boost in hardware sales, RDR2 caused no boost at all for example despite releasing a year earlier in gen 8.

Since GTA 6 is gonna be so insanely huge I do expect it'll still cause a significant boost the period it comes out, perhaps making it sell an extra million or so this holiday than it would've sold otherwise but sales will return to normal quickly after 2027 begins. The people expecting it to cause a much bigger boost than that and even some sort of long term boost are being quite unrealistic I'd say since the vast, vast majority of people who will play GTA 6 on the PS5 will already have one by November this year. Some people will have bought one last year due to expecting to play GTA 6 by May. 

And don't forget it had a PS4 Pro bundle at $400 and Spiderman released that same holiday. Even with both of those (1 being exclusive) the PS4 still sold less in 2018 than 2017. I just think GTA 6 won't get PS5 or Xbox Series to sell as much this year than last since as you said most people who want to play GTA 6 on PS5 already have it.