Pushing Buttons: When we don't know the true sales figures for consoles, players lose out

The outgoing boss of Sony's games division, Jim Ryan, who joined the company a few months before the launch of the original PlayStation, was interviewed by the official PlayStation podcast last week to mark his retirement. He talked up the PlayStation 5 as potentially Sony's "most successful ever console across multiple vectors" – interestingly, he did not specify what those vectors actually were. It would have to go some to beat the PlayStation 2's total of 160m – so far it's sold about 55m. As for that PlayStation 2 total: that's actually the first time we've heard it, in this podcast, in 2024, despite the fact that the PS2 was discontinued in 2013. The last official number we had for the PS2 was "more than 155m" as of March 2012, a number that's still quoted on Sony's own website.