Shipments are measured in increments of 10k.

1 = 10k
10 = 100k
100 = 1M
1000 = 10M

Fiscal year format: FY3/1998 = Fiscal year ending last day of 3 (March), 1998

[1] Nintendo lumps together everything the NES sold from its launch to August 31, 1985. These are Japan sales only.

[2] Nintendo starts ending fiscal years in March rather than August. This fiscal year is technically only seven months long.

[3] Sony launches the PlayStation in Japan. We have shipment figures for December 31st, 1994 (roughly 300k) and May 27th, 1995 (1 million exactly). 880k is my compromise figure, assuming stronger sales in earlier months of the year.

[4] All shipment numbers for non-PS4 or PS5 Sony consoles after this point are estimates, because that's the point at which Sony stopped giving out any shipment data for them at all. I estimated by using VGChartz data from the end of April for each year.

Lifetime:
Nintendo - 799M total
Sony - 569M total

After PlayStation release:
20 Nintendo wins (668M)
7 Sony wins (569M)

After PSP release:
12 Nintendo wins (467M)
5 Sony wins (398M)

After PS4 release:
4 Nintendo wins (141M)
4 Sony wins (147M)

FY3/2022 projections (as of May 2021):

Nintendo: 25.50 million (Switch only)
Sony: N/A

Since the PS2 launched its pretty much a tie though

Damn that's an impressive amount of work you must have put Into this! Quite an interesting comparison though. Even though Nintendo has "won" more often than not, Sony isn't far behind in total sales - AND they've har fewer consoles. I wonder if the Switch alone Will be able to turn the tides for Nintendo again, but I doubt it

Really impressive for how long Nintendo kept selling the NES.

Yeah, Nintendo kept selling them in Japan until September 2003.

Good work..... thanks.

I think if there is one thing this data makes really clear, its that Nintendo is a handheld company.

For curiosity's sake, what do you classify the Switch as?

this is a really good thread, good work man :D

Sony is likely to win this year, but next year might be very close.

Yes, that's what I expect too.

FY3/2019 could look like:

Switch: 15 million
3DS: 2 million
PS4: 17 million