"The company has confirmed to the Guardian that after 12 years and 150m units sold worldwide, making it the most successful home games machine of all time, all PS2 production has ended worldwide"

So i guess its official?

My grandfather died 5 days before christmas and the funeral is tomorrow.
You will probably rethink your post as soon as someone in your family dies.

Youre right, I just suffered a loss in the family and this news, if true, makes me even more sad.

Sad day, Sony needs to announce an official LTD sales.

Exactly. I bet this is just like the article we had a few days ago, where Sony announced it was stopping shipments to Japan and the author stretched it to the whole world.  Trust me, when Sony stops production altogether, we will have a long press release stating as much.  It will also include the final shipment numbers for HW and SW.

I think, for what it's worth the final breakdown for PS2 is something like this:

Globally: 155-157m?

US, Canada (50m ish for US & Canada), Western Europe, Australia (43m ish in W. Europe and Australia), and Japan (22m in JP) (115m-ish)

Continental Asia outside Japan (Hong Kong, Phillipines, South Korea Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Israel, China, Russia, etc) (20m)

Mexico (4m?), Central America (1m?), South America (10m?), Africa (2m?), Eastern & Central Europe (3m?) (20m)

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/88773/sony-ships-65m-ps3s-in-q4-11-to-lose-29b-in-fy-lowers-ps3-fcst/

We know that through the end of 2011, Sony had shipped 154.4m PS3s (they had shipped 150m through January 2011 via a press release after reaching 149.8m on the final day of 2010).

The forecast for that year (to March 2012) projected 4m PS2s shipped, and the demand had been falling 50% year over year each quarter. So I think it's reasonable to assume PS2 ended up at 156m or so globally.

Why would Sony issue a press release?

The original DS is around 154m through 2012, will be interesting to see how close it gets to PS2 figures.

Goodbye PS2. You weren't my favourite, but I don't think any other home console is gonna come close to seeing your level of dominance again. You had some pretty cool games, too :P

(I should probably buy a new PS2 to keep spare, actually. Wouldn't want my disk-based PS1 + 2 collection to be unplayable in the future!)

Well, the last hard number we got was March 2012, which was 155.1M.  For April-June, the PS3+PS2 shipped numbers were 2.8M.  Sony also announced the PS3 was down YOY (it shipped 1.8M in the same period for 2011), so the that would mean the PS2 at least shipped 1M, which puts it at 156.1M.  For July-Sept, the PS3+PS2 numbers were 3.5M.  I'm going to guess the PS2 shipped at least 500K of that number, which would put it at 156.6M.  There's not doubt the PS2 has shipped a few 100K for Oct-Dec, so my guess is it's at least managed to pass 157M by now. 

And I'm going to guess that this author was confused, like the previous author from a few days ago, and we'll still see PS3+PS2 numbers for at least a couple more quarters in 2013.