Sony has reached the milestone of selling 100 million PlayStation 4 consoles. The console has now been on sale for five years and seven months. No other console reached the 100 million unit mark in the same time frame.
Analyst Daniel Ahmad makes a comparison on Twitter with other consoles. So far, only Sony’s PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo Wii have passed 100 million copies. The PS2 took five years and nine months, and the Wii a little longer.
The achievement of the milestone is apparent from the quarterly figures that Sony has published. In the past three months, 3.2 million PlayStation 4s have been sold, bringing the total to exactly 100 million. It is not known what the ratio is between regular PlayStation 4 models and the Pro variant. Sony does not publish any figures on this.
Console Sales Comparison by analyst Daniel Ahmad
The supply of PlayStation 4 consoles is slightly down compared to previous quarters, but the console is therefore in the end phase of its life cycle. Sony has already announced the first details of the successor. The presumed PlayStation 5 will probably be released in 2020; In any case, Sony has indicated that the console will not come this year.
Sony says that more than half of the games sold now consist of digital downloads. This is the first time that physical discs have been overtaken. In the past quarter, 53 percent of games were sold digitally. A year ago, it was only 43 percent in the same quarter. Sony also sold more games: 42.9 million compared to 40.9 million in the same quarter last year. The number of paying PlayStation Plus members grew to 36.2 million.
The figures also show that deliveries of Xperia smartphones continue to plummet. Sony delivered 0.9 million copies in the past quarter, compared to 2 million a year ago. Deliveries of TVs and digital cameras also decreased compared to last year.
Sony achieved an operating profit of 230.9 billion yen in the past quarter, or about 1.8 billion euros. The profit was therefore 18.4 percent higher than in the same quarter last year. Earlier this year, Sony merged its camera, smartphone and TV divisions. Despite the decline in deliveries, the new Electronics Products & Solutions division, which now includes these product groups, made more profit than last year.