During a call with financial analysts, Sony warned that it now expects PlayStation 5 availability problems to continue through the end of 2022.

“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,” Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki said during the call, which has not been made public. “We have sold more than 100 million units of the PlayStation 4 and considering our market share and reputation, I can’t imagine demand dropping easily.”

As you may recall, there were questions about whether Sony would be ready to launch the PlayStation 5 during the 2020 pandemic, but Sony insisted it would be able to do so. And the firm did launch the new console family in November, as promised, while warning that production wouldn’t be able to meet demand.

In late April, Sony revealed that it was able to sell almost 8 million PS5 consoles since the launch, beating the number of PS4 consoles it has sold during a comparable period 7 years earlier. But it could have sold many, many more and the consoles have remained sold out everywhere.

Now, it looks like that problem, which was originally expected to clear up by late 2021, will continue through at least the end of next year.

Rivals like Nintendo and Microsoft face the same component shortages, of course. Nintendo, which had hoped to produce between 28 and 29 million Switch consoles in 2021, now only expects to make—and immediately sell—about 25.5 million units. Microsoft, meanwhile, hasn’t updated its own schedule for meeting the demand for the Xbox Series X|S, but it’s reasonable to assume they’re in the same boat as Sony.

Tagged with PlayStation 5