Sony announces that since its launch, PlayStation 4 sales have reached 50 million units, surpassing the SNES.
This is quite an amazing achievement considering the PS4 has only been on the market a little over three years. This figure includes the recently released PlayStation 4 Pro, the redesigned PlayStation 4 “slim” and the original PS4 model (released November 2013). The previous milestone of 40 million units sold was announced in late May 2016, meaning a whopping 10 million units have been sold in the last six months alone. It’s important to note that these numbers represent units sold to consumers and not units shipped to retailers, as units shipped are often used to over-inflate sales figures.
The commercial success of the PlayStation 4 – which is available in 122 different countries – has been nothing less than meteoric. It has outpaced both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 combined in the same amount of time by around half a million units. Sony state that they hope to sell around 60 million PS4s by the end of this fiscal year (31st March 2017) and currently look right on track to meet this ambitious target.
To put these figures into perspective, lifetime sales of the SNES finished at a little over 49 million. The next best selling piece of gaming hardware, the Nintendo 3DS currently sits at almost 62 million, a figure the PlayStation 4 will surely eclipse, as sales of the 3DS are dwindling due to Nintendo shifting its marketing and development resources towards the Switch. Microsoft have been continually cagey about releasing sales figures for the PS4’s main competitor the Xbox One, though recent estimates by Nvidia put the Xbox One’s lifetime sales somewhere around the 29 million mark. Nintendo’s Wii U is currently languishing at around 13.5 million units sold.
The best selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2 sold upwards of a staggering 155 million units. Will sales of the PlayStation 4 come close, or even beat this figure? My guess is no, however I’d be suprised if lifetime sales didn’t reach somewhere around the 100-110 million mark, putting it on par with the original PlayStation and the Nintendo Wii.
