As part of its latest earnings, Sony has made an announcement that makes the PS4 the first games console to reach 100 million units sold.
Today, Sony released its latest earnings for the first quarter ending June 30, which revealed that the PS4 [$299.00 at Amazon] has managed to sell 100 million units.
Sony revealed that it sold 3.2 million PS4s between March 31st and June 30th, after announcing that 96.8 million units had sold in the previous quarter. Meaning that just two months quicker than Nintendo’s Wii, PS4 hit the 100 million figure in 5 years and seven months,
In reaching this milestone, the PS4 now counts as the fastest games console to hit 100 million sales.
Sony also revealed that for the first time, gamers are buying more games via digital downloads than physical discs, marking a trend that’s been ongoing for a while now.
According to Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, the PS2 reached the same total in five years and nine months, whereas the PS4 took just five years and seven months.
According to WinFuture, a report from Ace Research Institute’s analyst Hideki Yasuda predicts that the PS5 will indeed release in November of 2020 for a price of $499. Thus time is running out for the PS4 to move up the sales charts much further. In the all time sales list, the PS4 is now within touching distance of the Nintendo Wii (101.63 million) and the original PlayStation (102.49 million). It should easily surpass them before becoming last-gen, but next on the list after that is the Game Boy, which achieved 118.69 million units sold which pretty much looks out of reach.
The PS3 is the only PlayStation not to achieve 100 million sales, only managing 87.4 million.
To add onto Sonys statistics:
- There are 36.2 million PlayStation Plus subscribers as of June 30, 2019, which is up 2.3 million from the same period the previous fiscal year.
- PlayStation 4 software sold 42.9 million units in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2019, which is up 2.3 million from the same period the previous fiscal year. 53 percent of those sales were full game software digital downloads, compared to 43 percent the previous year.
Sony is promising that the PS5 will support 8K graphics, 3D audio, SSD storage, and backwards compatibility with existing PlayStation 4 titles. It will also use an eight-core CPU based on AMD’s third-gen Ryzen line and include a GPU that supports ray-tracing graphics. Sony will also ship some type of disc support on the PS5.
But when that time comes how well the PS5 does depend on many factors including how much it costs, how good the initial games line-up is to give it sales momentum, and whether Microsoft manages to give Sony some strong competition with Project Scarlett.
Microsoft is also lining up its Xbox Project Scarlett console for the holidays in 2020. And just like the PS5, it will also support 8K graphics, SSD storage, and ray tracing.