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The PS4 has sold 70 million units, while PSVR tops 2 million

The PS4 has sold 70 million units, while PSVR tops 2 million

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James Bareham, The Verge

Sony announced today that the PlayStation 4 has hit a major new milestone, surpassing 70 million units sold worldwide. That puts the console on track to surpass its predecessor very soon. (The PS3 sold just over 80 million units over its lifespan, while the PS4 achieved comparable numbers in just four years.)

How the PS4 compares to its most direct competitor, the Xbox One, is unclear, as Microsoft hasn’t released specific sales figures for the console. As of last January, it was estimated that the Xbox One had sold around 20 million units. Sony also doesn’t say how many of those PS4s are the new Pro model, though back in June the company claimed that one in every five new sales was a Pro.

But the PS4’s new milestone does compare favorably to other recent video game hardware launches. Nintendo’s 3DS handheld, for instance, has sold 68 million units since launching in 2011, while the Switch has sold just over 7 million units in its debut year. Along with the hardware numbers, Sony also says that more than 617 million PS4 games have been sold to date, both digitally and at retail. However, it’ll require some big sales spikes to surpass the PS2, currently the best-selling console of all time at 155 million units sold.

PSVR Review Lead

On the virtual reality front, PlayStation VR has also hit a new milestone topping 2 million units sold. That number suggests that interest is picking up; it took eight months for the VR headset to hit 1 million units, and it doubled that number in just six months. In August, Sony cut the price of the headset, and then in October the company introduced a slightly redesigned version. Sony also says that more than 12 million PSVR games have been sold as of this month, but what’s in store for the future of the platform is still unclear as of now.

“We’re still trying to understand exactly what people are going to want to do in that medium,” Sony Interactive Entertainment America president Shawn Layden told The Verge back in June. “It’s hard to make predictions about it. People will want it to be smaller, lighter, wireless — these are all things we’re looking at from a conventional iteration process. But I don’t presume to be able to tell you what VR is going to look like in the year 2018 or 2019. We’re going to find out together as we go along.”