Sony PlayStation 4 Becomes 2nd Best-Selling Home Console In History
Sony tacked on an additional 2.8 million PlayStation 4 console sales during its second quarter for fiscal 2019 (July through September). Those sales bring the cumulative tally to 102.8 million PS4 units to date, making it more successful (in terms of units sold) than the original PlayStation, and second only to the PlayStation 2.
Second place among four generations of PlayStation consoles is nothing to sneeze at—the PS2 sold 155 million units during its lifetime, a record that might never be broken at Sony. Incidentally, the PS4 not climbed to second place among Sony's own game consoles, it also edged ahead of the Nintendo Wii, which has seen 101.6 million unit sales.
This achievement is only mildly surprising. The PS4 became reached 100 million unit sales last quarter, hitting that benchmark faster than other console in the history of gaming—it took five years and seven months to achieve the milestone.
Sony has enjoyed strong PS4 sales since it launched in November 2013. Only recently have sales started to slow down a bit—this most recent quarter represents a down tick of 400 million units sequentially. Here's a rundown of PS4 sales for the past six quarters...
- Q2 2019: 2.8 million
- Q1 2019: 3.2 million
- Q4 2018: 2.6 million
- Q3 2018: 8.1 million
- Q2 2018: 3.9 million
- Q1 2018: 3.2 million
That's nothing to fret about, however, because (A) it's already sold like gangbusters, creating a large base of PS4 owners to sell games and accessories to, and (B) we are nearing the tail end of the PS4's life cycle.
Looking down the road, Sony has already revealed some details about the PlayStation 5, due out in "holiday 2020." The PS5 figures to be a big upgrade over the PS4, with custom CPU and GPU silicon from AMD, real-time ray tracing support (at the hardware level), and a long overdue swap to a solid state drive for internal storage chores (faster load times for the win).
Don't go kicking dirt on the PS4's grave, though. Sony has managed to extend its relevance with an upgraded PlayStation 4 Pro and special edition models like the Marvel Spider-Man variant, and of course there are some high-profile games in the pipeline. In addition, Sony is likely to see an uptick in sales in the coming weeks, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around the corner.
