Sony’s PlayStation 4 continues to widen the gap between it and the Xbox One with a strong 2016. In a statement, the consumer electronics company announced that over 53 million PlayStation 4 consoles had been sold to date. After the launch of the PlayStation VR headset, the PlayStation 4 Pro, and the remodeled PlayStation 4 Slim all at the end of the year, as well as big software releases for the holiday season, Sony sits comfortably on top of the current generation sales charts, nearly doubling the Xbox One’s numbers so far.
While it can’t be confirmed at this time, we suspect the mid-October release of the PS VR — a device that has no comparable equivalent on Microsoft’s console yet — as well as the 4K-capable PS4 Pro have factored into the surge. Over the holiday season alone in 2016 Sony announced that more than 6.2 million PS4s were sold across all iterations of the console. During that same holiday time period, Sony stated that between both digital and retail, over 50 million games were sold. The most popular PS VR game digitally on PSN in 2016 was Job Simulator, which just announced surpassing $3 million in sales today.
“We are truly grateful for the tremendous support from our fans and partners, which has helped to make this holiday season one of the best in our history,” said Andrew House, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in a prepared statement. “We will aim to continue the momentum this year by broadening the PS4 title portfolio, further enriching the revolutionary gaming experiences on PlayStation VR and high quality gaming experience on PlayStation 4 Pro, while also expanding network services. We will remain steadfast in making the PS4 the best place to play.”
At CES 2017 this week, Samsung confirmed it has sold 5 million Gear VR headsets, which is one of the first times a major VR headset manufacturer has truly provided a specific and hard sales figure.
Firm sales figures have not been made publicly available at this time regarding the PS VR unit itself, but following its launch week, Sony did state it had sold better than expected in the realm of “many hundreds of thousand“. Since this was over two months ago, one can only speculate what that number looks like now.
