PS4 sold (to consumers) 4.2 million units as of Dec. 28 2013

Just announced at CES by SCEE CEO Andrew House.

Thats 4.2 million units in a little over a month. for a console that was sold out nearly every day of december, that's an incredible feat.

Xbox One has sold 3 million so far. PS4 has sold 40% more. Lines up with the spec advantage. ;p

Not surprised by these numbers. Good news. Great to see both next gen consoles doing well! All we need now are more next gen games! Q1 looks promising with Titan Fall, Drive Club and Watch Dogs being released.

Sony is performing very well with the PlayStation 4 thus far. I can only imagine what the total number of those consoles will be sold this generation by that Japanese company.

Wow Microsoft is doing really good if Sony is beating them by only 1.2 million units despite the fact they're in 38 more markets, and $100 cheaper.

Impressive. Sony was being extremely conservative when they stated they hoped to sell 5 million consoles this fiscal year.

in a few weeks time it will have done that

That is both sad and hilarious. What a stunning tumble Nintendo has taken.

Wonder what Nintendo's Executives are thinking. They must be realize they need to do something fast at this rate.

Not surprising. Great to see both the PS4 and Xbox One doing so well.

And they have yet to release in Japan.

PS4 has won this gen.

Some more sales data from Sony.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-01-07-ps4-sells-4-2-million

[UPDATE]: After the keynote, Sony released a round-up of updated facts and figures for the PS4. Through the end of the year, Sony said a total of 9.7 million PS4 games were sold, including both physical and digital copies. Among the best-selling titles were Call of Duty: Ghosts, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Battlefield 4, FIFA 14, and Sony's own Killzone: Shadow Fall.

Sony also touted the PS4's success in pushing subscriptions to the PlayStation Plus service, which is required for online multiplayer games on the system. PS Plus subscriptions are up 90 percent worldwide since the launch of the system.

I was hoping for something like that and i'm sure glad that it did not disappoint and the reason for its absences from the stores was because people bought it and not because Sony messed up their deliveries :D

No, they won't. When you you hear Reggie complain about them not having games and that Wii U is a better systems during VGX, you know something is up. You can't win the console war with Wonderful 101, Pikmen and Super Mario 3D World...

They're not, nor are they concerned because they live in a bubble where competition isn't a reality.

Exactly what i am thinking aswell, they don't care what anyone else is doing

Very nice to see a leader beginning to assert itself. Sony projected 5 million units by March, but they're going to blow by that easily. It's hard to say what Japan will do, but it's definitely going to make the existing number more lopsided as well.

It's also amazing they sold as many as they did considering they were pretty much sold out the minute they arrived -- hell, you still can't find them except in very short bursts. Who's to say what the pent up demand is? Another million units? Two million? No one can say, but their competitor has been readily available on shelves since Christmas, which tells me demand peaked already for the Bone, and it was heavily front-loaded and likely benefitted from the PS4 being constantly sold out during the holidays. I think the chasm is going to widen dramatically in the coming months, especially since the only real fight is here in North America -- it's already over from a global perspective.

I will say that 7.2 million consoles sold between the two in just a couple months ought to give the industry doomsayers a hot cup of STFU, while simultaneously killing the notion of 8 year cycles. Historical precedent is usually set for good reason -- if 8 year cycles were a good idea, I can assure you the folks at Atari and Nintendo, and Coleco, and Sega, and all the other companies who stepped into the ring would have done it. All they did was frustrate demand and create ambivalence about the hobby, which presented opportunities for false leaders to step up and claim crowns they hadn't won (or even earned). The five to six-year cycle will reassert itself now, just as it should. On top of reassuring the health of the industry, we're seeing a market correction at work as well, which is a beautiful thing.

I'm surprised Sony managed to manufactured that many PS4's, fixing the mistakes they made with the PS3 early on is paying off. Once the console is easily available like the X1 is at the moment, there should be more varied exclusive software available ( DriveClub, Infamous ).

It's a real shame when you cant win a console war with actually good games. Especially when the opposition currently has none.

@TwistedShade: Actually almost anything sells when it launches near the holidays, don't you remember the expensive PS3? It couldn't be found on shelves, and after the holidays the demand for the PS3 stuttered throughout the year.

Sony is in more markets, and the Xbox One is only 13. It took Microsoft 13 countries to sell one million, while the PS4 managed this with just the US and Canada.

It probably would be higher than 4.2 million but demand continues to outstrip supply. Once Sony meets demand, and the launch of the PS4 in Japan, Sony will be sitting rather comfortably.

Sony has its fingers in a billion weird pies (when I was in Latin America, I was surprised to see that there was a Sony channel) and some of those pies are in volatile markets (film, which often makes money for Sony but lost Sony quite a bit of money this year) or in competitive markets (Samsung is kicking Sony's ass in tvs and while I owned a Sony tv once upon a time, now my three HDTVs are Samsung) so while I don't pretend to be an expert investor, I can understand concerns about Sony overall despite the fact the game division is surging.

All that being said, your crowing about Nintendo's market valuation is a little weird because it is utterly disconnected from gaming. Nintendo's stock investors don't care about Nintendo's sales (or lack thereof) or market position, they care about its profitability. Nintendo took radical steps to save the 3DS (a massive pricecut, buying exclusivity for Monster Hunter, killing off support for the then thriving original Wii, neglecting the Wii U) which have hurt its profitability these past few years. What shareholders are hoping for isn't success, but a return to profitability. If Nintendo managed to return to profitability with sub-Gamecube sales in the console arena then Nintendo's shareholders will be happy.

If Nintendo wanted to save the Wii U or even avoid Wii U style disasters in the future, they would give NOA and NOE autonomy to make original games and cut deals with developers. Nintendo had Westerners on its payroll making original games as far back as the 8 bit era when Western games were niche on consoles, so its completely insane that in modern times, when the tables have been turned, Nintendo has shut down or sold off anyone capable of making original games for the Western market.

For over 6 months, they didn't have squat, they are seriously lacking in the pr and they don't manage to announce new games or communicate with their consumers

Thats is huge, imagine 4.2 million x $500 ! I think its time for that $100 drop, so the rest of us can buy it. How about it Sony !! ?

@Shame-usBlackley:

I’ve heard that Sony switched its shipment from freight to air to make sure it had enough stock for December. That means the cargo that was supposed to arrive in January was already sold in December. We may see a lot of shortages in the month of January if that’s the case. It’s impressive that they have already sold 4.2 out of the 5 million by March but I doubt they will keep selling at this rate.

Great post btw. I read an article today that pointed out that Sony had sold 2.1 million units by November 30^th. That means it showed no signs of slowing down and sold another 2.1 million in December. MS had announced 2 million units sold on December 10^th which means they sold only 1 million more worldwide by January 6^th. This explains why I keep seeing shelves full of Xbox Ones at Walmart literally every time I go there.

The sales are already slowing down.

I hope Nintendo cuts off its loses and releases a new powerful console by 2016. This should force Sony and MS to abandon any plans for a 6+ year cycle.

They've announced plenty of new games though and Nintendo Direct does a pretty decent job.

Not everyone watches those Nintendo Directs and they have announced games, sure, but they should have been here by now

Well they've also got commercials and show up at games shows, so I'm not sure what else there is to do. And some of the games are here.

I want one.

@Shame-usBlackley:

Speaking of console life cycles...Here is an interesting read about the cycle from Gamestops CEO from October of last year. Their is mention in the article below, that this will be the last generation of game consoles, as we have come to know.

http://m.cnet.com/news/game-console-updates-will-come-faster-gamestop-ceo-predicts/57606513

So why didn't they release games after the console came out?

I must've missed that, because I didn't spot anything about the last generation of consoles anywhere in the article. He's essentially advocating for shorter cycles, and he's absolutely right -- 8 years is far, far too long between generations, especially when it was so hastily implemented as an idea. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the industry decided it was going to increase generation length by 60 percent, with no plan in place to ensure that it succeeded. It failed miserably. Is anyone really surprised?

The mistake he makes is that he advocates for much shorter cycles than the 5-6 year cycle, which is a recipe for failure, and is exactly what started killing off the PC in the 90s and early 2000s. The benefit of consoles is that developers have enough time to become familiar with the hardware to pull some amazing things out of them. Releasing new consoles every few years would frustrate the sentiment we are already seeing coming off the 8 year-cycle that we've seen from some that "this isn't much of a jump." Imagine how the market would react if a new system came out every two or three years... we'd see diminishing returns, and the reputation would begin to assert itself that jumping into new hardware wasn't worth it. It would be a fucking disaster. I agree with the man on most of his other points, but on this one, he's just completely dead wrong. It's already been tried, it failed miserably, and would again.

Yeah, I mean, we're already a third through January and the thing is still having preorder sales on Amazon for future shipments. It's insane...

And yeah, you can find an Xbone pretty much anywhere now. The demand has been sated. I was looking at some of the back room pics posted on GAF by Gamestop employees showing their stockrooms jammed with them... there would be a half dozen Wii U's, no PS4's, and a metric ton of Xbones. So it looks like a lot of channel stuffing was involved here. If the NPD number for December comes in anywhere less than a million for the Xbone, something is going to smell really fishy.

And Nintendo is just... man. I don't know what to think about them anymore. I'd LIKE to see them put their gloves back on and get in the ring, but they seem to have no understanding of traditional console gaming anymore. They want to rely on parlor tricks and snake oil like motion controls to lure in people who are not reliable purchasers of software... what good does that do anyone? And where did all those people who bought the Wii go? What good was the Wii if it didn't create new consumers of video game products? They've marketed this machine horribly, they are still overpriced (not as much when compared to the overpriced 360 and PS3, but still overpriced) and there's ONLY NIntendo games coming for it. I don't see it as a market problem, but a Nintendo problem, and I would have no problem with Nintendo being in the console space if they weren't dangerous when some of their reckless, horseshit ideas start polluting up the other consoles. Nintendo wrought the motion control destruction on the market. For that alone, I think it's best they leave the hardware space and go third party. I would like it not to be the case, but I just can't see them releasing a conventional, high-performance machine with a traditional controller, which means more pain for the industry from gimmicks, carny-barkers, and side-show freaks and I just don't want to see the trainwreck again.

Great SONY make new record at this time in next gen console & i hope Sony PlayStation win all the time.

Remember how MS stuffed channels with the X360?

http://informationarbitrage.com/post/698368232/microsoft-channel-stuffing-and-desperation-old-tricks

And then the more recent post, after Microsoft uttered “no mas” and had to come clean.

From Blackfriars’ Marketing 01/26/2007:

Microsoft reported earnings this evening, and with it, they announced

their actual results for XBox 360 sales over Christmas. The good news:

Microsoft shipped 4.4 million XBox 360 units in the fourth calendar

quarter of 2006. The bad news:

the company only expect to sell another 1.6 million by July 1

, lowering its projection of 13 to 15 million down to only about 12 million. These numbers nicely confirm

Blackfriars’ earlier prediction that Microsoft was shipping excess XBox 360 consoles to retailers

to make its 10 million XBox’s sold by the end of 2006.

The money quote on XBox 360 sales:

“We are just being cautious about the second half,” said Liddell in an interview. “There is a reasonable amount of inventory in the channel.”

As for Nintendo, its worth keeping in mind that with the Wii Nintendo abandoned the system completely in 2010 in order to shore up the then flailing 3DS. Its extremely likely that the tens of millions of casuals that bought the Wii moved on to smartphones, Facebook games (which were huge for a minute), Kinect or stopped gaming.

Nintendo's treatment of the Wii even hurt them among their small but intensely dedicated and loyal core fanbase. Nintendo has twice demonstrated (they dropped the GC in order to focus on the then flailing DS and they dropped the Wii in order to focus on the then flailing 3DS) that they place a higher premium on the handheld market than the console market. Handhelds get at least an many Marios and Zeldas as consoles plus they have Pokémon, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and suchlike (I think Pokémon is the only one of those games to never see a real game on consoles, but all of those games appear much more and sell much better on Nintendo's handhelds) and get infinitely better third party support.

Last but not least, I don't have a deep objection to the existence of motion controlled games (I was buying motion controlled games long before the Wii and I still buy them). I don't want motion controls forced on every genre or for that matter every gamer, but in certain circumstances they can be useful (creators in LBP used the Move to draw and animate their own sprites).

just so u guys know, Xbox One isnt released yet in these countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland. (IN EUROPE)

And? when they are released in those counties in Q3 - 2014 or early 2015 Sony will have gained a foothold and restocked their shelf's so when most people go to buy a next-gen console they will get the PS4 not the X1.

And most in those countries who wanted a X1 will have gotten one either in stores that parallel-imports them or on amazon/online stores.

yeah, it is sad, i want them to do well

PS4 didn't merely set a launch record in the UK (and pretty much everywhere else it launched) it was the UK's bestselling console in 2013 (beating out the X360 by a couple thousand units).

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=748649

I said it before and I'll say it again, I think MS is going to need to do what Sony did with the PS3 and slash the price of the HW rather than charge people extra for tech that doesn't clearly benefit gaming.

wii u sold 3M also

i think 3M is the fanboy base number, 1,2M is regular people buying a product based on rational thinking

if we have 3M nintendo sony and M$ fanboys, M$ is also doomed

@CarnageHeart:

Man, I'd totally forgotten about Microsoft stuffing the channels with the 360. They didn't just stuff it, but stretched it out. Amazing.

And while I don't hold a grudge against motion controlled stuff that is ancillary to the core experience, the Wii held people hostage... either you took motion controls, or you smoked a dick, and that really riled me up seeing as most of the experiences suffered because of that extremist philosophy. Motion controls would be fine in games that justified their use, it's just that so many of them were released under absolutist pretenses, stuffing the square peg in the round hole and all that.

@S0lidSnake said:

@CarnageHeart said:

@Shame-usBlackley

LOL, yeah I'd say that's channel stuffing in action...

@Shame-usBlackley said:

@S0lidSnake said:

@CarnageHeart said:

@Shame-usBlackley

LOL, yeah I'd say that's channel stuffing in action...

Lol, someone enjoys paint too much. I've never heard of channel stuffing though. I'm assuming MS is shipping stock to stores that don't need it to increase the "units shipped number", right?

@firefox59: Exactly right.

What was once a decent thread has now been hi-jacked by nerdism and fanboyism.....smh

I'm pretty sure they did since I've been playing them an awful lot.

So why was there 6 months where nothing came out? It's their own damn fault