PS5 Ships 32.1 Million Units as of December 2022

[HigHurtenflurst]

ShadowLink93 said:

HigHurtenflurst said:

Yeah not much to do about it being production shipments, ultimately doesn't affect lifetime sales (well not much, the changeover year where Sony reported both production & sales to retail for PS2 shows them being 600k difference, not sure if units are getting counted twice as Sony never released a lifetime total)

I was just including it so people can make their own judgement about how fast PS1&2 sold early on in comparison to PS3/4/5... on that chart I linked for example the PS3s first two figures are 5.5mil & 11mil in production shipments, so that's 16.5mil vs the 12.6m hardware shipments from your table.

For PS1, the 4.3m is definitely until March '96... Sony's "Fiscal Year" naming is unusually based on the year it started in rather than the year it ended in like most other companies.... That's why FY99 has PS2 included and FY06 has PS3 included in it (whereas for Nintendo the Wii isn't reported until FY07, but both of them are referring to the same time period of 12months ending March 2007)

The reason that PS3 was over produced at the beginning was because Sony thought it would sell much more than it actually did and they weren't expecting the lack of demand. They intially forecast 6 million for Nov '06 to Mar '07 but only sold-in 3.5 million, however the PS1 and PS2 were in high demand from the start so they probably sold everything they produced and therefore the gap between production and sold-in was likely much smaller.

Yes true for PS3, but however big the difference between expected & real demand is, production shipments have to lead retail shipments just as retail leads consumer sales. PS3s shipment figure is directly comparable to PS5s, but PS2s will be inflated slightly when talking about "fastest to milestone"

PS2 was definitely a huge leap in launch demand compared to older consoles, but newer consoles with simultaneous worldwide launches & increased modern production (recent chip shortages aside) can easily match it's early shipment figures (PS2s mid-life dominance & sales endurance however are not likely to be matched soon)

PS1 not really in such high demand early on as mentioned the first 4.3milion production shipment figures spans 16 months or 6 quarters. Though VG sales in general were much lower back then so I guess PS1 did well compared to prior hardware... it's FY97-98 when PS1 started smashing records.