It took Sony 98 weeks to reach a milestone, but that’s not an alarming pace.

On Gamesindustry, building on GfK data, we read that the PlayStation 5, available since November 2020, is the fourth fastest to reach two million sales in the country. It took the same period (98 weeks) for the ‘granddaddy’, the PlayStation 3. The Nintendo Wii reached this figure in a concise 57 weeks, the PlayStation 2 took 60 weeks, and the PlayStation 4 got two million sales in 75 weeks from its respective launch.

The PlayStation 5’s performance is outstanding for two reasons. On the one hand, the console is in short supply (although we recently reported that the opposite was starting to happen in the US in September, and Gamesindustry’s Chris Dring tweeted last week that Sony’s console stock was in the best shape it had been in over a year). On the other hand, the console has recently been price-marked in the UK…

“Given the stock problems surrounding the PlayStation 5, it is fair to say it would have easily outpaced the PlayStation 3 to 2 million units. One clear thing is that the significantly higher price of the PlayStation 5 has not hindered sales, with consumers willing to pay the £105 premium shown on the average price of both consoles over this 2 million unit period. The PlayStation 5 has delivered the highest revenue for any console at two million units. Xbox One took 104 weeks to reach two million, exactly two years, and Xbox 360 took 110 weeks, which was 2.12 years. Although the Xbox 360 was slower to this mark than Xbox One, the Xbox 360 overtook Xbox One after three years and remained Microsoft’s biggest install, with around nine million in the UK,” said Dorian Bloch, head of GfK.

We dread to think where the PlayStation 5 would be if it weren’t for the pandemic, the war and the resulting shortcomings…

Source: VGC