PS4 sales top 70 million units worldwide

Sony has now sold more than 70.6 million PlayStation 4 consoles worldwide, the company announced today.

The figure, which consists of internal Sony sales estimates, covers the period from the PS4’s debut in November 2013 through this past Sunday, Dec. 3. It represents sell-through to consumers, not units shipped to retailers (aka “sell-in”). The company does not break out sales figures for the PlayStation 4 Pro, although the head of the U.S. PlayStation division told Polygon in June that at the time, one out of every five PS4s sold was a PS4 Pro.

Sony’s most recent update used a different metric than today’s announcement, so it isn’t possible to compare the numbers directly. But in late October, following the end of the second quarter of the company’s 2017 fiscal year, Sony said that global shipments of PS4 consoles had reached 67.5 million units.

Earlier this year, Sony said it had shipped 20 million PS4s during the 2016 fiscal year alone, and the company forecast a slight downturn for the current fiscal year, saying it expected to ship 18 million units by April 2018. (Sony’s 2017 fiscal year ends March 31, 2018.) However, better-than-expected PS4 sales for the first half of the fiscal year — April through September — led Sony in October to revise its fiscal 2017 forecast upward to 19 million units shipped.

With today’s sales figures, Sony appears to be on track to meet that goal. Note that sell-in numbers are always a bit higher than sell-through totals. After all, you have to ship units to retailers before stores can sell them to customers, and part of those shipments will sit on store shelves waiting to be purchased.

The new figure of 70.6 million PS4 sales includes this year’s Black Friday weekend, during which the current “slim” model of the console was widely available for $199.99 ($100 off the regular price). Sony is sure to sell some more consoles during the rest of the holiday shopping season, although the company perhaps won’t top last year’s incredible numbers, when it shipped 9.7 million PS4 units worldwide during the October-December quarter — a record in PlayStation history for console sales.

Sony also provided an update on PlayStation VR today. The company said that as of Dec. 3, it has sold more than 2 million units worldwide of the PS4-based virtual reality headset since its debut in October 2016. That’s twice as high as the figure Sony gave in June, when it announced global sell-through of 1 million PSVR headsets, which suggests that sales are starting to pick up. Sony said that a total of 130 PSVR games are now available, and added that 150 more are scheduled to be released by the end of 2018.

“We are delighted that so many people are enjoying the unique entertainment proposition of PlayStation 4, and that an emerging technology like PlayStation VR continues to gain traction,” said Andrew House, the outgoing chairman of Sony’s gaming division, in a news release.