PS2 2005 vs PS4 2018 NPD

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:
PS4 WW is still tracking ahead of PS2. And seems that even for USA PS4 2018 will be able to match PS2 2005 at the end.

I've never liked global comparisons for LTD sales (and even lifetime total sales to an extent) because they're misleading and never tell the whole story. Staggered launches have been the norm since forever ago, with the Switch being the first to launch in every region on the same day (though the Wii came fairly close, launching in NA, Europe, and Japan within a less than 3-week span, though smaller markets came months later). And such staggered launches have never been consistent from generation to generation, with the sequence of regions and the time gaps never being the same. Combine this with the fact that each region has distinctly different buying habits, and it's clear that it's impossible to accurately compare global launch-aligned sales in any meaningful way. That's why the only fair comparisons are the ones that focus on each region separately. And when you do that, it's clear that the PS4 is not selling faster than the PS2, at least not in the U.S. and Japan (in Europe it seems to be keeping pace with the PS2).

When you compare USA+Europe launching first with 399 pricetag on PS4 and no library against PS2 launching much cheaper, with big library and accelerated production (PS4 was on it's first 2 years improving production continuously to keep up with demand) the comparison is also distorted.