Sony says PS5 pre-order demand has been ‘very high’

Sony Interactive Entertainment has seen very strong demand for PlayStation 5, according to CEO Jim Ryan.

“The demand as expressed by the level of pre-order has been very considerable,” Sony’s gaming boss told Reuters.

According to Ryan, the company took as many PS5 pre-orders in the first 12 hours in the US as it did in the first 12 weeks for PS4.

Ryan said Sony is “working as hard as we ever can” to meet demand but that “it may well be that not everybody who wants to buy a PS5 on launch day will be able to find one.”

Sony is gearing up to launch PS5 on November 12 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, and on November 19 in the rest of the world.

Multiple retailers sold out of PS5 pre-orders just hours after launch details were announced on September 16, despite Sony telling fans that pre-sales for the console would begin the following day.

PlayStation subsequently apologised for the troubled PS5 pre-order launch and promised to release more consoles to retailers imminently. Selected retailers opened a second wave of PS5 pre-orders on September 25 which also sold out quickly.

Retailers Amazon and ShopTo have informed some PS5 pre-order customers that they won’t receive the console in time for launch, while Ireland’s GameStop chain has told some customers it won’t be able to fulfil their pre-orders until 2021.

PS5 is priced at $500/€500/£450 for the standard edition and $400/€400/£360 for the Digital Edition, with the only difference between them being the former’s inclusion of a disc drive.

Ryan recently said Sony expects PS5 sales to clear seven million units by the end of its fiscal year on March 31, 2021, outperforming PS4’s launch.

An embargo on PS5 coverage lifted earlier today. The first PS5 unboxing videos have been published by various media outlets, after US-based publications received their review units last week. Press have also finally been able to compare the size of retail PS5 units to other consoles.

Ryan also told Reuters that PlayStation could be open to acquiring more development studios.

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