PlayStation boss ‘hopes’ for improved PS5 supply situation later in 2021

Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan has said the company’s hoping that PlayStation 5 shortages will ease in the second half of 2021.

Strong demand coupled with global chip shortages mean Sony’s console has been difficult to come by since its launch in November 2020.

“We’re working as hard as we can to ameliorate that situation,” Ryan told Wired.

“We see production ramping up over the summer and certainly into the second half of the year, and we would hope to see some sort of return to normality in terms of the balance between supply and demand during that period.”

Ryan previously refused to guarantee the company would be able to satisfy PS5 demand by the 2021 holiday sales season, noting in a February interview with the Financial Times that “there are very few magic wands that can be waved,” although he also said then that availability would improve throughout the year.

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In late April, Sony’s chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki said it’s unlikely that supplies of PS5 consoles will drastically improve during the company’s current fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2022.

And the outlook Sony is providing behind closed doors is reportedly less positive. “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,” Totoki said at an analyst briefing last week, according to Bloomberg.

Totoki said last month that Sony was considering various solutions to help it cope with global chip shortages, including potentially altering hardware designs or sourcing secondary suppliers.

Sony will reportedly start production on a PS5 hardware redesign in 2022. That’s according to Taiwanese business website DigiTimes, which claims that suppliers including semiconductor foundry TSMC are planning to start producing the redesigned PS5 console between the second and third quarters of next year.

Following similar supply issues, rival Microsoft is piloting a scheme which lets selected Xbox One users reserve Xbox Series X/S consoles for purchase, seemingly direct from the company.

PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst also told Wired that the group has over 25 first-party PS5 games in development, nearly half of which are entirely new IP.