- during UK's EGX 2015 celebration of PlayStation 20th anniversary in Europe Shuhei Yoshida talked about the current success of PS4 sales

- Almost 2 years after its release, the console has sold more than 25 million units – in comparison, it took the Playstation 2 more than 2.5 years to sell 20 million units.

- Yoshida said about PS4 success:

"It’s just beyond our imagination. We are so happy. But I for one am a bit nervous because we do not completely understand what’s happening. You need to understand why your products are selling well so you can plan for the future, right? It defied the conventional thinking. Lots of people thought the dedicated game hardware might not be needed going forward, but still lots of people are very excited. When you see the new games coming out and being announced this E3 and Gamescom, I think there’s a good enough reason for a gamer to believe this is something worth investing in."

- Yoshida appeals to a different outlook when it comes to a console success:

“Well, it depends on how you look at things. Typically – it’s ironic in a sense, When a platform’s doing really well, studio side kind of struggles. It probably has some relationship to these two things. When a platform’s doing well, third-parties support it more. So from a pure software standpoint, there’ll be more competition”,

-  Sony CEO Andrew House previously said the following about Sony's first party output:

"We are working very hard to continue very strong support from third-party publishers and developers. Our first-party lineup is a little sparse this year so I think this places an even greater emphasis on getting good third-party support."

- in a recent Eurogamer interview Yoshida said Sony's own games become more prominent when their console is not doing so hot:

"When the platform’s not doing so well, our games become more prominent, and we get larger market share within the same platform. Because we continue to support the PS3, in the launch year of the PS4 we had The Last of Us and Gran Turismo 6 and Beyond and so on, many games, we were still working hard. We’re just head-down, focused on delivering the games for the near future. We’re happy with how it’s going, and we’re excited about welcoming PlayStation VR. From a delivering games standpoint, we have work to do. People constantly ask us for the big exclusive triple-A games."

http://wccftech.com/sonys-yoshida-ps4s-success-ironic-sense/

Playstation is that brand for home consoles.

People were tired of the super long PS3/XB360 cycle and wanted a new system to upgrade to.

Sony made better design choices with the PS4 and thus had better early momentum than the XBox One which was crippled by the expensive Kinect 2.0.

And once the PS4 became the "go to" console, more people started to buy it because their friends had one and you want to be able to play with your friends online. So it all snowballs from there.

People wanted a console and Sony did the best job delivering on expectations. $400 is a good price and had all the big name third party titles they wanted and nice mix of tiers of games from east and west topped off by first party support. PlayStation is a global brand for a reason and after lessons learned from PS3 the PS4 avoided such pitfalls and is selling well. I am just curious how quickly it will get to $300 and $200 price points to really see boom in sales.

Idk why is he surprised? After all PS4 has been really well advertised like everywhere and the games are also very appealing to this current time, where people like competitive games and games with very engaging stories.

PS4 is like the culmination of what PS3 started, but unfortunately people always associated PS3 with its high price and not the "cool" thing to have in its early years. Then PS3 really went on making a name for itself with a lot of great games that never had a chance to truly shine due to the high competition from the other consoles and their own great games.
Now people don't want to miss the opportunity again and are buying the best console on the market and with all the upcoming Earth shaking games.

This man is way to humble.