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PlayStation confirms new PS2 sales numbers to hold onto its record

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A close-up of a PlayStation 2's buttons. The reset button is on top and the eject button is on the bottom.
Nikita Kostrykin / Unsplash

Despite modern consoles like the Nintendo Switch continuing to rise in the charts, the PlayStation 2 is still the highest-selling video game console of all time, with new numbers confirmed Tuesday for the first time.

Sony published a console history on the PlayStation website in celebration of PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, and it includes a new sales number for the PS2. This brings the total sales up to 160 million. While Nintendo always seems to be nipping at Sony’s heels with the Nintendo DS and Switch, the DS still remains the second-highest-selling console at around 154 million followed immediately by the Switch at around 146 million, according to Nintendo’s website.

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We’ve known about this PS2 milestone for a while, but an updated number has never been released until now because Sony stopped releasing total device sales in its financial reports in 2013. Former CEO Jim Ryan said in an interview with the Official PlayStation Podcast earlier this year (as reported by IGN) that PS2 sales were around 160 million, although he didn’t seem completely certain. The history page confirms that statistic.

Evolution of PlayStation: PlayStation 2

While Sony stopped manufacturing the PS2 in 2013, the sales numbers have continued to climb, albeit slowly. The last time they were officially updated was in March 2012 with 155 million units sold.

The official timeline also includes sales numbers for its other consoles. The PS4 is the second-highest-selling PlayStation console at 117 million, followed by the PS1 at 102 million units sold between launch in 1994 and 2006, with the poorly received PS3 bringing up the rear with 87 million.

The website doesn’t list numbers for the PSP and PS Vita, nor its PS VR devices. We only have estimates due to the aforementioned secrecy on Sony’s part, but there might be something else to this. The Vita didn’t sell well and failed to find a mainstream audience, forcing Sony to (maybe temporarily) get out of the handheld game. Estimates reported around when the company ended Vita production put the PSP at around 80 million units, while the PS Vita stalled between 10 million and 15 million units. Sony’s virtual reality experiment has always been niche, but it also feels like it’s not investing in its PSVR 2 system.

That’s the fun thing about history: It has both your successes and your failures. And the PS2 is arguably the company’s biggest success story. The console was able to build off the goodwill set by the PS1, and it featured backward compatibility, a disc drive, and one of the most iconic catalogs in gaming history.

Carli Velocci
Carli Velocci
Former Contributor, Games
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
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