Drew Swanson is a features editor for the U.S. Pacific Northwest. As a lifelong gamer, I've enjoyed everything from ARPGs like Diablo to JRPGs like Pokemon and Persona. His love of digging into gaming lore and history naturally led to a passion for sharing these ideas with others through writing. He has been writing about games professionally for over four years, including two years as a contributing writer at High Ground Gaming before joining GameRant. He also has a background in video game studies with a degree from Washington State University, and won the 2021 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Showcase Award for his writing and design work on the game Quest for Arete.
playstation-Published game sales have been essentially down for nearly five years starting in 2020. PlayStation's first-party games saw a steady decline in sales each year over these five years, with a slight increase in 2025. This trend is consistent with anecdotal observations from gamers, which have led to complaints about Sony's lack of first-party products during the PS5 generation.
Sales of first-party PlayStation games have been declining since 2020.
Over the past seven years, sales of games released on PlayStation peaked in 2020 and have been declining by millions of units nearly every year since, according to data compiled by Game File based on annual sales reported by Sony. PS5 launches with games like: Spider-Man: Miles Morales and devil's soul Remakes are likely the driving force behind 2020's peak. But the decline in sales of about 15 million units between 2020 and 2021 is emblematic of the larger problems Sony faces with this console generation.
