It turns out a lot of people own PlayStation 4 consoles. The system shot out like a rocket right out of the gate, to mix several metaphors, and hasn’t really let up since despite fierce competition from the Switch, but also other entertainment products like phones and Netflix. In what theoretically should have been the hardest generation for consoles to compete, the PS4 is proving conventional wisdom isn’t always correct.
According to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, this makes the PS4 the fast-selling home console to ever hit 100 million units, ahead of both the Wii and the PS2 by two months. While PS4 sales were actually below expectations for the quarter, likely owing to the generation winding down, the console still managed to set that record ahead of its 2001 predecessor.
Speaking of going against conventional wisdom, Sony also reported that 53 percent of all game sales on the PS4 this quarter were digital, challenging the long-standing institutional knowledge that digital only makes up about 20 percent of game sales. This is the first time that a first party has reported digital sales overtaking physical software sales, indicating a pretty major shift in the market. Physical sales are still quite important, they’re just now only half the equation versus the vast majority of it.
With the PlayStation 5, or whatever the successor is called, due to be revealed sometime in the next year, Sony is likely to go hard on owner-anticipated software in that intervening time and not necessarily PS4 sales. Games like Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima will likely motivate a lot of players to spend money and should still sell even more consoles.