The latest generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft have been notoriously hard to find since their launch back in November, and if you"ve been hoping things will get better, it may still be a while. As reported by Bloomberg, the company has warned a group of analysts that supply restraints may continue into 2022 as demand continues to outpace supply.
Despite the production limits it"s been hit by, Sony"s sales of the PlayStation 5 are nothing to scoff at. In less than half a year, its next-gen console has sold 7.8 million units, which is in line with sales of the PlayStation 4, one of the best-selling consoles of all time. The company also expects to sell 14.8 million units this year, despite saying it won"t be able to keep up with demand. Sony"s chief financial officer, Hiroki Totoki, said that the company will need to ramp up production as early as possible, but even then, it will be hard to meet consumer demand:
“I don’t think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn’t be able to catch up with demand."
Many facets of technology have been affected by supply issues in semiconductors over the past year thanks to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the latest next-gen consoles being one of the more affected products. Likewise, the latest graphics card from both Nvidia and AMD have been very hard to find. In all of these cases, the situation has been made all the more complicated by people who buy the products as soon as they"re available to resell at above-market values.
In the console business, Nintendo also issued a warning that component shortages could still cause road bumps in sales of its Switch hybrid console, though it"s projecting 25.5 million unit sales for the current fiscal year. As some of the restrictions around COVID-19 are lifted in the coming months in some countries around the world, the situation could get better, but it seems as though some companies aren"t banking on that recovery just yet.