Sony Sold 6.2 Million PS4s During Holiday Season
By Rory Young 04 January 2017
Sony proudly announces the sales numbers for the PlayStation 4 during the 2016 holiday season, moving at least 6.2 million units in just over a month.
Sony’s domination of the console market began to show its limits in 2016, with monthly PS4 sales falling behind Microsoft’s Xbox One as the holiday season approached. The Xbox One also outsold Sony’s console on Black Friday, capitalizing on Microsoft’s impressive marketing and discount opportunities. However, PS4‘s market control simply cannot be slowed, as the system still went on to win November, and according to Sony’s newly released sales numbers, dominated the rest of the holiday season as well.
As reported by GameSpot, Sony officially announced that the PlayStation 4 sold a staggering 6.2 million consoles over the holiday season. That’s from November 20, the week prior to Black Friday, through December 31. Those numbers bring the official total of PlayStation 4 units sold worldwide to 53.4 million as of January 1, 2017. While it’s interesting that Sony chose to include November sales with December sales, that doesn’t diminish how impressive the numbers are.
Just for some perspective, the PlayStation 4’s holiday sales numbers see the console’s overall sales crossing those of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES currently sits at 49.10 million units sold. Next on the list for the PlayStation 4 to catch up to are the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo 3DS handheld, which both sit between 61.9 and 61.5 million units sold, respectively. The PlayStation 4 still has around 30 million units to sell to catch up to the PlayStation 3 though, let alone the PlayStation (102.49 million) and the PlayStation 2 (over 155 million).
For comparison’s sake, Microsoft’s Xbox One is sorely behind. While the Xbox One did outsell the PlayStation 4 in several recent months, they weren’t months with as large amount of sales as November and December. What also makes this difficult is that Microsoft doesn’t officially announce the total sales numbers of the Xbox One. The best we can do is mention that EA’s CEO offhandedly mentioned the Xbox One had 19 million units sold in January 2016. From there, it takes a bit of estimation.
Sony said in January 2016 that PS4 had there had been 35.9 million units sold up to and through 2015. That means that Sony sold an estimated 17.5 million units in 2016, which is kind of crazy. Considering the Xbox One is selling at well over a half of the rate of the PlayStation 4, and that 2016 seems to have been one of its better years, it’s probably sitting around 25-35 million. In other words, Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up. Maybe the Scorpio will resound in a similar way as the PlayStation 4 Pro did?
Both the PS4 and the PlayStation 4 Pro are currently available, along with the recently released PlayStation VR headset.
