PlayStation 3 sales reach 70 million, reveals Sony

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   November 18th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Sony Computer Entertainment marked yet another milestone as the sales of its PlayStation 3 console hit 70 million earlier this month.

The company revealed in a recent announcement that the number of its current-generation console sales to retailers around the world touched 70 million as of November 4, 2012.

This news comes a month after Sony’s game division admitted suffering significant losses during the current year.

Just a month ago, the company’s primary competitor Microsoft had reported the Xbox 360 sales getting to the same figure that PlayStation 3 sales touched this month, which indicates the former to be a little ahead of its rival in the race.

However, Microsoft launched its current-generation consoles a year before Sony introduced its console in the market, thus making the stats of the latter come off as more impressive.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the figure of 70 million points only to the number of consoles that was sold to the retailers and therefore does not include the sales the company made directly to the customers.

Aside from reaching the 70 million sales milestone, Sony also revealed that the motion controller for its current-generation console named PlayStation 3 Move has sold over 15 million sales worldwide in just over two years.

The controller was launched on September 15, 2010, and is not supported by over 400 titles, including Electronic Arts (EA) FIFA 13 and Wonderbook: Book of Spells.

Sony also revealed other statistics, which include the availability of 170,000 pieces of downloadable content (DLC) on the PlayStation Network (PSN), 57,000 of which are specific for a particular game.

To date, there are 3,590 games available for PlayStation 3, while more than 595 million units of these games have been sold worldwide.

PlayStation 3, successor to the PlayStation 2, has had a wonderful journey over the last six years and still has enough gas left to continue breathing for a while.

The capabilities of the hardware were instantly recognised as huge, though it took developers a significant amount of time before being able to really explore and reveal its potential.

Even today, the graphics that PlayStation 3 is able to produce take many gamers by surprise, leaving them in awe.

However, the technology used by Sony for its current-generation console is beginning to come off as primitive to the developers, analysts and even tech-savvy gamers, thus leading to call for a more high-end console in the market.

With already having enjoyed a bigger life-cycle than any other console in the past, both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are expected to remain the key players in the market for still some more time as neither Sony nor Microsoft has revealed much regarding their next-generation consoles.

If the speculations are to be believed, PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 would be available in the market by the end of next year.