It’s official: Sony’s PlayStation 4 has sold 100m units, to become the fastest-ever selling home console.
Following its launch in November 2013, PS4 has piled on an average of 1.1 million consoles each month. Like its big rival, the XBox One, the PS4 managed to move a million units on day one — albeit in one territory alone, compared to Microsoft’s worldwide release.
The PS4 is only the fourth home console to reach the nine-figure mark, after the Nintendo Wii and two of its own three predecessors. The original PlayStation took 9.5 years to hit the figure, with the Wii hitting it in just over 6.5 years. Sony’s second console, the PS2, was the previous record holder at five years and nine months, which PS4 has now beaten by two months.
PS4’s best year to date was the 2016-17 financial year, with 20 million units sold. This peaked at around 105,000 a day during the holiday season of October 1 through to New Year. Although annual sales have slowed more recently, the console sold as many units in the first three months of the 2019-20 financial year as it did 12 months previously, only just lagging behind the same period in 2017-18.
The PS4 now stands fourth in the all-time home console sales list, although it’ll move up into second place behind its grandfather by September if the Q2 results match those of previous years. Sony is forecasting 15m sales for the current financial year, a slight drop on the 16m it was predicting back in April.
There’s still a little way to go to match the PS2’s 155m lifetime total though. The impending PS5 may slow things up somewhat, but the possibility of cross-generational gameplay may yet see that record broken too.
It’s not just hardware hitting landmark figures either. PS4 software sales are verging on crossing the billion unit mark, with another 40m games shipped in the first quarter of this financial year. That’s almost 9.5 games sold per console, and the Q1 results show that just over half of these are now digital downloads.
See more articles on PlayStation 4 and Sales Figures.
