It took 3 years for PlayStation to earn $300 million in PC sales according to former manager, which makes the platform less than half as lucrative as the PS4 and PS5

Nathan Drake in Uncharted — (Image credit: PlayStation)

PlayStation's PS PC unit earned only a total of $300 million between 2021 and 2023, former PC planner and insights manager Jerry Liu reveals.

Liu added the detail to his LinkedIn profile, spotted by industry sleuth Timur222 on Bluesky. Liu's profile now explains he helped PS PC "grow from $0-300M in Net Revenue for Sony in 3 years" by, among other things, convincing "leadership to pursue more aggressive pricing strategy that helped to increase gross revenue of the business unit by 25%+." But while PlayStation continues to use – let's say it politely – asseritve pricing with console sales, it's reportedly retreating from PC altogether.

That rumor is less surprising when you compare Liu's PC sales numbers to Sony's public sales data; it took PS PC three years to go from 0 to $300 million, while total software sales for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 reached $303 million in just 2021. In 2022, the consoles made $264 million for the year, and $286 in 2023 – all of which adds up to nearly triple the amount of revenue PS PC was able to squeak through in the same amount of time.

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When you factor in PlayStation hardware sales, too – the PS4 sold more than 117 million units worldwide as of 2022, and the PS5 sold over 92.1 million units by 2025 – PlayStation on PC looks even more like an unappetizing hunk of bread.

Still, Liu's revelation helps us complete our imperfect understanding of PlayStation's motivations lately. The publisher might fear the flexibility of hardware rivals like Valve and its all-purpose Steam Machine, but it's also been shutting down first-party, AAA studios and walking away from mobile with less obvious direction besides the desire we also observe in other developers: dump everything except what could make the most impossible sum of money. And PS PC doesn't make money on the level that Sony's looking for.

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