It is a day that every console fears. Dread it, run from it, destiny still arrives all the same, and the PlayStation 4's day has come. According to Daniel Ahmad, Sony has stopped counting PlayStation 4 shipments, which means as of March 2022 the final total is 117.2 million units shipped out. That's a lot of PS4s.
Of all consoles, the only three that have sold more than the PS4 are the Game Boy and Game Boy Color (118.7m), the Nintendo DS (154m) and PlayStation 2 (155m). As of May 2020, there have been over 1.56 billion game consoles sold, which makes me wonder how long until we hit the 2 billion marker. Sometime this decade, I'd imagine.
One has to wonder if the PlayStation 5 will live up to the lofty expectations placed upon it by Sony, who you'd think would expect at least 100 million units shipped out. So far, it looks pretty good. As of July 2021 the console has sold 10 million units worldwide despite ongoing hardware shortages. That's extremely impressive, especially when you consider that the PS5 is the fastest selling console in US history despite its manufacturing and shipping challenges. How many units would it have sold in that time if there had been no shortages and no pandemic? 20 million? Who knows.
What we do know is that by the end of the year the Nintendo Switch, which has been selling like crazy since its launch, will most likely pass the PlayStation 4's final totals. That should honestly come as no surprise, with the Switch generally being cheaper and having exclusives that people want to play, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which has sold an absurd amount of copies.
This makes sense, as while Sony and Microsoft have arguably been transitioning their consoles into cheaper PCs with temporary exclusives (or not at all in Microsoft's case), Nintendo has maintained its slate and kept its exclusives on its own console, forcing people to buy a Nintendo Switch if they want to play games like New Horizons.
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