Well there are other forms of marketing than just TV. Print/internet ads, social media, YouTube, etc.

Outside VG I don't have any social media accounts. I'm not attempting to be argumentative, I take your word for it. I just can't speak to it.

I'm not one to downplay this great achievement, but do we know what kind of shipments this is?

I remember for PS1 and most of the PS2 era, Sony would bolster about "production shipments", which only meant they had produced a unit, and hadn't even really shipped it to a retailer yet. That created A LOT of confusion back then. And, to this day I'm not entirely certain if the numbers we have for PS2 shipments are entirely correct. They changed the metric halfway through the gen.

So, forgive me, but I'm not a hundred percent trusting of Sony's announced numbers..

Congrats to PS4! And unlike Endgame it didn't barely limp over the finish line either. It's going to keep selling for several more years.

Endgame limped its way to highest grossing, not to a milestone. PS4 is not yet the highest selling console so it's not the same thing.

It's more like PS4 fastest to 100m is the equivalent of Endgame being fastest to $2 billion.

Fair enough.  Maybe they are similar.  Endgame sold about 40% after it hit $2b.  PS4 will probably do close to 40% more.  I guess they are the same after all.

Sure it matters. We don't pretend failures don't exist when taking data and discussing it. Even the one time system of some companies are discussed over here and other places.

Neo Geo for example sold 1M and to this day a lot of people are still nostalgic about it. Also I'm pretty sure in VGC there are people that use Virtua Boy to claim Nintendo done first something another company is doing today with success.

If someone wants to evaluate the average success of Playstation systems PSVita is also an abnomaly (a supported one) with 15M versus the average of 90M.

There is no production of consoles that is shipped without a store requesting.

And unless you are keen on an information of several PS1 and PS2 produced and send to a dumpster to inflate shipment I would like to see.

On the contrary, that is not how it works. Consoles are manufactured in numbers that would eventually meet customer demands (customers in that sense are distributors/stores). So in this specific case, 3.2M PS4 consoles were manufactured last quarter, and shipped (in the very sense of the word) to various continents. Some of those consoles were already sold when they boarded the ships, some were not. Since the consoles spend around 12-14 weeks on the ships (for the faraway continents), there is ample time to sell those unsold consoles. This the key and the crux of the business, predict the right amount of worldwide orders a year ahead of actual delivery time. To avoid that too many (or any at all) consoles leave the ships unsold, as this would mean you the manufacturer would have to stock them (and pay for it). Also worldwide shipping means shipping the correct amounts to every destination, you don't want one region overshipped and another region undershipped, leading to more problems and costs essentially. Sony has a pretty impressive track record for manufacturing (=predicting order numbers) the right amounts of consoles over the years.

You realise that Sony's (and anyone elses's) quarterly financial reports are not "Suggestions to the public"? Making false statements in a fiscal report is not a particularly good idea and could lead to jail time (not that noone has ever tried it, though).

You gave the explanation to agreeing that there isn't really overship/undership. Many in VGC believe that console manufacturers force stores to accept the consoles so they can have overshipping to look good on the books. Problem is that they state the revenue (which needs to be sold, can't be just manufactured), and on real world any excess or lack of shipping will be a very small percentage instead of an entire quarter worth of shipment. So yes, you could have some few hundred Ks that is moving on the ship still unsold, but you won't realistically have 1M+ on the warehouses over the world that then you need to reduce 1M of the forecast.