its the ancillary things too. The UI is much improved, online much improved, controller is vastly improved. The little things add up.

Thanks for pointing that out. If you will excuse my laziness would you mind pointing out which 3 divisions in Sony made more money than playstation?  Be interesting to know..I'm assuming insurance is one of them? That has done well for sony for some time now..

Likely 1 million or so undertracked here then, I find it hard to believe that there are currently almost 3 million PS4's on shelves.

WTF has Vita to do with console market... Vita/3DS competition is mobile market lol

Cool story, ps2 still clearly is at a disadvantage due to Japan only first.

Yet the ps4s biggest Japanese game is being shared with 3DS... I could careless about your opinion of trying to treat handhelds as if they aren't apart of the gaming market. At the end of the day its what I expect from Sony fans trying to spin Sony selling less hardware this Gen. No where did I indicate in my post I was referring to home consoles only. This will be my last response to you.

No where in my post did I indicate I was talking about home consoles only. I could careless about the conversation you want to make it. The market includes handheld devices whether Sony does well at them or not.

The whole concept of Console generations is compeletely arbitrary and meaningless. Does the PSP belong to The PS2 Generation or the PS3 generation? It game out between both. Ohh well I guess that's arbiratrary. Does the PSV belong to the PS3 generation or the PS4 generation.  It came out in between both. Ohh crap. Looks like that's completely arbitrary too.

You want to lump PS3 and PSP sales together and PS4 and PSV sales together as if that actually means anything, well that's your perogative. However, such things literally only seem to matter to Nintendo fans, mostly because it helps mask how, with the exception of the Wii and DS, Nintendo hardware has sold less than its predecessor on a fairly linear path.

This is so wrong on so many levels  I don't even know where to start...

Let's start with the 4 mIllion PS4s Sony has entered into the fq report. This does NOT mean that those 4 million PS4s have been sold, shipped, eaten, sent to New Zealand (inside joke, don't think about that one if you don't know) or whatever.

This is the number of PS4s Sony has actually had manufactured within that quarter, and this is the number Sony must state primarily. Now these 4M units could be anywhere - from at the manufacturer to at in people's homes.

Now any console manufacturer doesn't like to be abused as a warehouse or storage facility. So once the consoles come off the package area in the plant, they almost immediately  start their voyage to wherever Sony wants them to go. The manufacturer makes as many consoles per day/week as the company has been ordered to make - and those orders were settled months to one year ahead of the actual manufacturing dates.

Here's the point: The best warehouse for Sony (or whoever is selling whatever) are the ships that carry the consoles from China to wherever. This takes roughly eight weeks. So for eight weeks, the warehouse problem is solved - and Sony actually still has time to sell the stuff on the ships.

If you walk into a shop and buy a shiny new box (not one with a pile of dust on it) right now, it was likely manufactured around late July. At that time, the shop may or may not have ordered the exact number of boxes they have now. So on every ship carrying consoles, some of them are already sold - some of them will be sold while the ship is on its way - some of them may be surplus (still not sold when the ship arrives).

So to sum up:

fqn, the number in the fq report = number of consoles manufactured.

Shipped = number of consoles that have left the manufacturing plant. For reasons given above, almost always the fqn number

Sold = number of consoles sold to distributors

Inventory = number of consoles not yet sold (usually given as a revenue value, not as a number)

fqn = Sold + inventory

As you can see, the real meaning of "Shipped" is simply the number of consoles that left the manufacturing plant. Shipped is often used as meaning "consoles that have been sold", which is an understandable, but incorrect use of the term.

In times of heavy demand, all consoles on a ship are long sold before the ship arrives at its destination, so "Shipped" becomes "Sold" and there is no inventory left to worry about.

It is the "Art of mass manufacturing" to actually have as small an inventory as possible, while not being totally outsold too early. It is also an art to "overship", knowing/guessing correctly that your inventory (= unsold consoles on the ships) will be rapidly depleted due to an incoming action of yours before you have to hire warehouse space at the ships' destinations (and your action actually leads to the planned result - which is another problem).

I'm qute sure this is exactly what happened this fq with Sony and the price reduction. It would have been massively stupid to plan the price drop and not have sufficient inventory (again, remember: inventory = unsold consoles on ships!) to sell for the expected increased distributor demand spike. So sometimes in July, a much larger number of  consoles started being manufactured and shipped - for an arrival date in probably late August/early Spetember when distributors were informed of the price drop. During July and August, those "surplus units" on the ships were not yet sold. Since those units _were_ manufactured and had to be counted in the 4M figure, they had to reappear somewhere, and that is (somewhat hidden) in the table of the inventory values. 

So to make a very long story short: In all likelihood, there were never 2.8M units on shelves. There were a lot of (then still) unsold units on ships by the time the report was written.

It's funny that it already includes stock for these months yet they still plan on shipping at least 7M or more this quarter; must be planning to sell even more in Q1 2016 than this holiday!
*facepalm*

Downplaying isn't amusing when it's so incoherent