Pushing Buttons: When we don’t know the true sales figures for consoles, players lose out

In this week's newsletter: Fastest-selling, highest gross revenue ... the biggest gaming companies have long employed untrustworthy metrics to hype up their products, and it's the consumer who always suffers

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The outgoing boss of Sony's games division, Jim Ryan, who joined the company a few months before the launch of the original PlayStation, was interviewed by the official PlayStation podcast last week to mark his retirement. He talked up the PlayStation 5 as potentially Sony's most successful ever console across multiple vectors" - interestingly, he did not specify what those vectors actually were. Time spent playing? Individual player spend? Sales? It would have to go some to beat the PlayStation 2's total of 160m - so far it's sold about 55m.

As for that PlayStation 2 total: that's actually the first time we've heard it, in this podcast, in 2024, despite the fact that the PS2 was discontinued in 2013. The last official number we had for the PS2 was more than 155m" as of March 2012, a number that's still quoted on Sony's own website. Ryan claims that 160m was celebrated as an internal sales milestone, but Sony never actually announced it. Industry analyst Daniel Ahmad did some back-of-an-envelope maths that substantiates the total, but it begs the question: why did Sony never actually tell anyone how many PS2s it sold?