Sony Sold Nearly Six Million PS4s Last Christmas

Sony announced today that it sold 5.9 million PS4 consoles over the holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. This figure pushes the console's total install base to 73.6 million units so far. 

What that means is that over 20 million PS4s were sold throughout 2017, maintaining a comfortable place as the best-selling games console of the year. By comparison, the Nintendo Switch sales are estimated at between 12 and 13 million for the year. That's still a strong figure though for the House That Mario Built, as the handheld hybrid was released March 3.

The number given by Sony is actually a slight drop from the 6.2 million it sold during the same period in 2016, down by about 5%. However software sales grew, going from 50.4 million to 55.9 million. In total, the console has sold 645 million games so far since its launch in late 2013.

 "Thanks to the continued support from our fans across the globe, we are honored to announce remarkable sales during the holiday season," said PlayStation president and CEO John Kodera. This was driven, in part, by a rise in downloads on the PlayStation Network. Sony boasted that it has 31.5 million PSN subscribers.

For now, the PS4 stands a mere eleven million units away from eclipsing the sales of the last generation of consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.