This has been explained many times quite politly. I am really starting to get a bit annoyed. A stupid picture does not hide the truth! Sony confirmed 155,1 million PS2 systems shipped as of march 2012, thats an ice cold fact that cannot be changed! The only thing that changed was the official shipment number as of march 2012. 155,1 million to over 160 million. I am by far not the only one doubting that. Only because you are dead wrong and have no arguments you through in some childish posts without looking at facts. Discussions on that basis are meaningless. Come back when you have arguments boy! By the way: you know the End of "The Shining?"😉

PS2 for sure shipped and sold more than that 155.1M as of March 2012, since it was discontinued in January 2013. So 100% the final number is over 155.1M. So 155.1M is not true or accurate too.

And some people doubt it shipped 4.9M in it's last Fiscal Year, while shipping 4.1M in the previous one. However here are some points:

1) PS2 was still selling well and in normal conditions Sony would continue to sell it at least for two more years because, since when you are stopping production of a system, when it's last year sales or shipments are more than 4M ? (for doubters if you want put it at 2M it is still a big number to cut the production and sales off, we have systems staying on the market until year of 100k units. So 1, 2 or 4M is too much for them to stop selling it) because of that they would normally continue to sell it for at least 2 more years till 2015.

2) I am not sure if it was confirmed officially or not officially but back then it was known that they shifted the production from the PS2 to PS4 and because of that, this was the main reason they cut the PS2 legs short (although they were the longest of all, they could still be 2 years longer as I mentioned in point 1.

3) Because of the previous 2 points, Sony knew that the interest for the system is still relatively big and so it's logical they would want to produce, ship and eventually sell more than normal amount of units after a year of 4.1M. So if they weren't in a hurry to stop the production they may continue the year with something like 3M shipped units, and do 2M for the next fiscal year ending in March of 2014 and at least 1M more for fiscal year ending in March of 2015. However because they had to cut the production of the PS2 because of the PS4, they may wanted to compensate somehow for this by producing and shipping more than they would otherwise do for that particular fiscal year since it's last one. So in the normal case they could ship for example 3M and 3M more for the next 2 fiscal years, but they did 2M extra for that last year, so that there is enough amount of units to sell at least till end of fiscal year ending in March 2014 too.

Of course this is not confirmed or official but it's logical. If I want to have food for the next three days but for some reason I can't go to the store tomorrow and the day after, I will just buy more food today, so that I can have food today, and the next 2 days. Of course the sales are not so simple, and it was risky stretching it for the units to be enough as far as fiscal year ending 2015 as I mentioned above, but if they could do 2M extra to be available at the stores for fiscal year ending 2014, why not ?

You can go on crying if you like, but it won't change anything. But the reality is this :

PlayStation®2 : More than 160.0 million

https://sonyinteractive.com/en/our-company/business-data-sales/

The PS2 officially sold over 160 million units (confirmed by Jim Ryan, by Sony, by Shawn Layden) whether you accepted it or not doesn't matter, we don't care what you think 

155,1 million was the figure Sony gave for march 31, 2012. In 2019 they changed it to "over 155 million". And in 2024 tgey changed it again to "over 160 million as of march 2012." As a logical thinking person i really don't buy that. If they said march 2013 we could talk but not in 2012. I am really sorry my kind friend, but that really does not add up.

As you saw I did an interesting calculation  and the strange thing was, using the official numbers we had, i subtracted it from our 525,3 million figure from Sony and got exactly to 155,1 million. I mean thats no coincidene?!

What confirmed the truth of that was the fact I was attacked by a member with some childish picture in a quite unpolite manner. Maybe he has personal problems... but maybe we can talk it out... i mean we are not at war here🤣😂 

First of all, every of the Sony's figures on their site read "more than .." So I bet the 155 or 155.1M figure was also "more than.." It would be odd to just be exactly 155.1M units. Second yes, that same date is odd, however I can see logic in that too, and I will write it down. At the time when it was 2012, Sony may have plans to continue updating the PS2 numbers, and they could still not got to the plan of not updating them anymore. Therefore they updated the more up to date figure - over 155/155.1M a month after that I suppose, since reports come month later after the given date. So at end of April they have updated it with the most recent up to date numbers. However they changed their mind on the updating schedule after that and decided not to update it anymore since Vita and PS3 weren't doing so good and instead they decide to combine them. In 2018 they may didn't want to update those since the Vita was still somewhat relevant and they still wanted the Vita numbers hidden. This year they did the update, and they used the same date and year, since that was the last official report they did on the PS2, and there may be some procedures or steps included when you update official report and because of that they haven't gone so far to update official report at which they could put the date March 2013 or something like that. I also think there are other things involved when doing official report but I am not specialist so I could not tell, but this is one possible reason. To update the date and year, they may need to put new report out. As I already mentioned in my previous comment, there is some logic to produce and ship more units than you did in your previous fiscal year (at least in this particular case), so it's not something illogical.

The calculation you did is not right since you put some value for the Vita where VGChartz has it at 13.13M now, and 15.86M before, and it's number can be anything in between. Also you put PS4 number at 84.23 from where ? If this is up to July 2018 is july included or not ? The sell in to consumers data according to VGChartz by that month is 81.4M and if we don't include July it's 80.6M, a huge different either way to your 84.23M number. Also the PSP number is 82.52M not 82.51. So I don't know how you reach to that " coincidence", but it looks like made up numbers. Also there is the thing that the one is sell through the other is sell in. It's getting complicated.

I am by far not the only one doubting that number. If the Switch hits 160 million, PS2 will get "ajusted up" to 165 million and you still would buy it. The reality is Sony never shipped 160 million units beside from demostations wich where lend to stores. I can officially confirm this to you. Go and ask any retailer what happens with demostations after the generation ends. PS2 is far under 160 million shipped, like it or not. I am not gonna make childish pics of the Tsar Bomba nuking something for "arguments". If you keep insulting here and spreading lies i am gonna report you! Or we have a normal conversation. I wrote a thesis about video games. Put the PS2 at ~155 million. And you know what? I passed! IF it was wrong a digital system every thesis has to pass would set a message for wrong information. But it didn't. So what?

You believe in a number that was puked out in a random potcast or a CEO printing a fantasy number on his personal system? Go on have fun. You can also believe the earth is flat. We live in a democratic society. We have free speech. But insultig people will get you banned. Moderators also read!

Demo units, unsold systems and so on. They need to write them off. They're shipped somewhere, maybe garbage, but that¨s not important. I believe the other manufacturers count the demo units as shipped systems, but maybe write them off earlier than a decade after the manufacturing of the system has ended. The point is, that I don't think Sony has done anything wrong. It's just that  the sold/shipped/manufactured is calculated this way in their accounting.

Thank you! Thats what i was refering too! If they write it off, the number has to be reduced! Also a demo station is a produced unit that gets shipped. You have to admit, that something is really fishy here. And they did that "announcement" (i call it "lienouncement") when the Switch surpassed 141,3 million and later upped the number again when they announced 146 million. Whats next? 165 million? 

But the point is that i am by far not the only one doubting these SHIPPMENT numbers. Its not about manufacturing. The PSP had far more than a million demostations so it did not pass the GBA. They would have made an announcement for sure if it did! 

My point is that i agree with you in one thing: Demo units are counting as "shipped". But even if you tried to use such a demo unit as a private user, you could not play any games with it expect the installed stuff. And its send back to the manufactor! Otherwise all consoles would have higher shipments, also the DS. And as the DS had 4 versions you could add quite a few million to its LTD  because every model had a demo unit and as i mentioned above, many stores order multiple of them. And they are not immortal if you know what i mean. Add in the fact that broken units get replaced. And that means even more "shipped" consoles. Have you got any idea how many of these units break because of costumers who couldn't care less? As someone who works in such stores i can also confirm this. How many broken demo units we see in stores? Be honest! These are millions over a timeframe of 10+ years, the timeframe also the PS2 was on the market. And it was not the unhurtable expectation, believe me. No matter how hard i get insulted, thats the truth and if we subtrack these units we have far less than 160 million units shipped.

For Nintendo systems its different: Nintendo reports "shipped to retailer". Not produced! If they did it would be a different story and we would probably  be looking at even less than 10 million WiiU's. Maybe it would be at only around 7 millon units shipped to retailers but they report "shipped". So we cannot argue about that.

You understand what i mean? A rented console you need to give back as a retailer but counts as shipped is no real shipped let alone sold through console.

Sony has changed the way it reports sold systems. It used to be shipped to retail, but changed to "shipped to warehouse" when they needed somehow report higher PS3 numbers AND they needed to get the systems off their operating budget. This was 2007 or 2008. Why this is important is, that this when it's "sold", meaning that one system shipped to warehouse is market down as losses, but the company still has it's budget it can operate with.

When it comes to PS2, a considerable amount of systems have been sold/manufactured with both methods, which may lead to disparency. At some point of time the disparency is fixed and the numbers actually match. The "shipped" number is (legally) "shipped through accounting". If the systems are demo stands to be returned, they're not shipped anywhere until they are returned from the shops and they're thrown to garbage. Or systems made for spare parts, they're "shipped" when they're used as spare parts or replacement units - or too many units were made and they've been thrown to trash.

There are millions of units less actually sold than the number of manufactured.

It's worthing mentioning that, for a long time it was up to video games enthusiastics, not the company, to estimate the amount of PS2 sold, using indirect and convoluted calculations. You can't blame one for being skeptical of this "over 160 million units sold" information when Sony drops it out of nowhere, having doing nothing to make things clear for more than a decade. Heck, we still don't know the exact number of PS2 sold!