The head of Sony Interactive Entertainment celebrated the sales, but said he would not recommend launching console in the midst of a global pandemic to anyone.
Sony had put in its best efforts to generate demand for the product – and it paid off: ‘absolutely everything is sold’, Jim Ryan said.
The console was finally made available to buy all around the world on November 19, after launching in the US on November 12.
Due to the pandemic, sales were limited to online-only, but many fans were left disappointed as it quickly sold out across various retail outlets.
Those who weren’t lucky enough to pre-order the console, found themselves in lengthy online queues.
a Russian news agency, the SIE president and CEO Ryan said his main feelings regarding the success of the launch are happiness and relief.
He said:
I guess my two principle feelings are one of happiness as things appear to be going well, and secondly of relief – we did it in this unusual, strange and frankly rather difficult year. Of all the things that I’ve learned this year, one is that I wouldn’t plan on doing another big console launch in the midst of a global pandemic, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else.
We might have had a few more to sell, but not very many: the guys on the production and manufacturing side have worked miracles,’ he said.
On the day of the launch, several retail outlets found their websites crashed due to the influx of customers and high demand.
By 9am on launch day, the Curry’s PC World website had more than 92,000 individuals in its virtual queue.
In anticipation of the launch, many games have got PS5 updates.
These include Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Spider-Man: Remastered, the highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, NBA 2K21 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
