PS5 sales jumped 22% in September. Bloomberg says GTA 6, Circana's own analyst says Wolverine

PS5 unit sales in the US were up 22% on last year in September, according to Circana's monthly data, and the two loudest explanations for why don't agree. Bloomberg put it down to people getting ready for GTA 6. Circana's own games analyst, Mat Piscatella, thinks Marvel's Wolverine did most of the work.

Both are looking at the same numbers, so it's worth starting with those.

What Circana's September report says

Circana's "September" covers 30 August to 3 October. Over that stretch PS5 was the best-selling console in the US in both units and dollars. Units were up 22% year on year and PS5 hardware dollars were up 43%, which made Sony the top-earning console maker for the month.

Everyone else went the other way. Switch 2 units fell 14% and Xbox Series X|S units fell 27%, which VGChartz says was the Xbox's worst September on record. Total hardware units across the market were actually down 3%, though hardware spending rose 12% to about $362 million, mostly because each PS5 sold for more.

On the software side, Wolverine launched straight in at number one. Piscatella says it had the highest launch-month dollar sales for a Sony-published game since Helldivers 2 in February 2024. NBA 2K27 was second.

Bloomberg's reading

Bloomberg's story, by Vlad Savov and Takashi Mochizuki and published on 22 October, ran under the headline that GTA 6 "fuels" the jump. It says US PS5 sales rose as people prepared for the game's release on 19 November, and credits the bigger rise in dollars to price increases over the past year and how popular the PS5 Pro has been. It also points to the Netflix mini-film topping the streaming charts in September.

It's not a daft read. The Extended Look landed right before this window opened, Rockstar's own site says the game "plays best on PlayStation 5", and Sensor Tower's pre-order estimates have about three in four digital pre-orders on PlayStation.

Piscatella's reading

Piscatella pushed back on Bluesky, as GTA BOOM reported on 25 October. "The data suggest to me that Marvel's Wolverine was the primary driver of the PS5 increase in September," he wrote.

His sharpest point is about Xbox. GTA 6 is coming to Xbox Series X|S on the same day, yet Xbox had its worst September ever. "So either GTA was not the reason for the PS5 bump, or people don't know it's also coming out on Xbox Series," he said.

He didn't say GTA did nothing. In an interview quoted by Of Zen and Computing, he put rough numbers on it, "probably 70% driven by Wolverine, 30% GTA VI, but it's all squishy numbers", and called it a gut read on the data. So the honest version is that both things probably helped and nobody can cleanly split them.

It's also worth remembering the UK looked different. In the week after the Extended Look, UK sales of PS5 and Xbox both jumped by about a third. That was a one-week spike in another country, though, and Circana's month is five weeks long with a huge Sony exclusive dropped in the middle.

What would settle it

October's numbers come first, and they're the cleaner test. Wolverine's launch month is done by then, so if PS5 stays well up on last year without a big exclusive pushing it, that's a point for the GTA camp. If it drops back to flat, Piscatella's split looks right.

November's report is the big one, since 19 November falls inside it. The thing to look at is Xbox. If GTA really is pulling people into new hardware, Xbox Series X|S should finally go up year on year in November too, because it's the same game on the same day. If PS5 climbs and Xbox keeps sliding, the story's more about PlayStation than about GTA. Black Friday lands in the same window, so the year-on-year comparison against last November matters more than the raw jump.

Circana usually puts each month's US report out a few weeks after the month closes, so November's figures won't be here until well after launch. Until then, both readings fit the data.