PlayStation And Xbox Sales Hit 25-Year-Low As Nintendo Takes Over

With Sony and Microsoft making drastic changes to their respective hardware, both companies have been found to have hit their worst sales counts in a quarter of a century.

We're hot on the way to a new era of console wars, with the Steam Machine forcing the hands of PlayStation and Xbox to start producing their new hardware.

Up first is set to be the PlayStation 6, with Project Helix following behind and taking the opportunity to undercut its competitors' price tags.

Yet with the PlayStation 5 Pro and Xbox Series X already proving to be stellar machinery, is there any need for new consoles?

Well, for the gaming giants, there is. Money talks.

Now more than ever, both Sony and Microsoft are reeling from their worst sales months in the last 25 years.

Nintendo Switch Wins Console Wars In 2026 As PlayStation And Xbox Plummet

This week, Xbox announced that it will end the production of the Series X console shortly after making huge price increases to its available hardware.

It's the same trend that PlayStation made recently, bumping its console prices up so that fans aren't tempted to go for the lower options when the PS6 arrives.

With these adjustments, recent studies found that PlayStation sales dropped 58 percent in May 2026, marking the worst performance in the month of May since the year 2000, six months before the PS2 made its way to North America.

For Xbox, it's even worse. This was the worst May ever recorded for Xbox sales.

Somehow, though, the overall gaming hardware sales have increased, as the Nintendo Switch 2 is providing gamers with a cheaper way of enjoying titles.

The Switch 2 overtook the Xbox for the second-best-selling console behind the PlayStation 5. Annual sales for Nintendo's newest handheld console even became the second-fastest-selling hardware product of all time with 5.9 million sales in the last 12 months, lagging only behind its own Game Boy Advance (6.5 million).

It goes to show why the sixth-gen PlayStation console and Xbox's rival are so needed for the companies. There's likely going to be a smaller difference in performance between previous generational leaps, but the need to produce another product to keep the cash flowing is almost a necessity.

007 First Light Leads The Way In Game Sales

As for games, well, this May was dominated by James Bond. The study claims that 007: First Light was the best-seller in May and has already become the fourth-highest seller of the year, hot on the heels of Forza Horizon 6, which arrived a month earlier.

IO Interactive

LEGO Batman was also given a shoutout behind Bond and Forza in the May sales department, proving to be a much more popular pickup than we first thought.

What is interesting is that, despite fears that gamers are going to be priced out of enjoying everything on offer this year, sales across the industry have risen year-on-year, with a total of $4.2B being splashed on consoles and titles this month, an increase of just over three percent from May 2025.

It's an expensive time to be a gamer, but there is still a lot of reward for our well-earned purchases.

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