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Calm down, folks, all is right with the world once more: Sales of the infamously hulking, expensive PS5 have now caught up with sales of the infamously hulking, expensive PS3 in the region, and Sony's latest machine got here a whole lot faster to boot.
"September 2025 US video game data fun fact - The PlayStation 5 has now surpassed the PlayStation 3 in lifetime installed base," Mat Piscatella of US industry analysis group Circana reports in a Bluesky post. "So that's cool."
Circana has reliable enough tracking data on the US retail market to make it a trusted source for the industry, but the group doesn't provide hard sales numbers, which makes it a bit tricky to put this sales milestone in perspective.
Sony officially reports PS5 sales at a global sell-in of "more than 80.2 million" as of June 30, 2025, just a bit behind PS3's global sell-in at "more than 87.4 million" as of March 31, 2017. The final report date of PS3 sales comes a year after the console was discontinued, so it's unlikely there are any secret millions of unreported consoles out there.
Those are, again, global numbers, and it's not that odd that the PS5 would beat the PS3's sales record faster in the US. The PS3 and the competing Xbox 360 would ultimately reach more or less the same global sales total by the time all was said and done, but in the US Microsoft's console proved dramatically more popular than Sony's.
Either way, the PS5's milestone is still impressive, since we're not even five years out from the launch of the console – the PS3 had a full decade on the market to build its install base, and with a much stronger library of exclusive games, to boot. The PS5 itself has a great library, don't get me wrong, but Sony's first-party output has slowed to a trickle in the modern era, we just ain't getting the MotorStorms, the LittleBigPlanets, or even the Folklores that we once did.
I'm staging a completely unnecessary fight between the best PS3 games and the best PS5 games.
