Sony Announces 50 Million PlayStation 3 Consoles Shipped Worldwide

Since its launch in november 2006, Sony can now reveal that the PlayStation 3 has shipped over 50 million units to retail. They are obviously quite proud of that fact, but this figure must be qualified, in that it doesn’t refer to the actual number of consoles sold to consumers, but to those which have been bought by retailers for sale. It is still a huge number, but the fact that Sony likes to reveal shipped numbers, whereas Microsoft prefers to reveal actual sold unit numbers, makes it hard to accurately compare the two. On April 1st, Microsoft had sold around 42.9 million units.

So, the numbers remain relatively even – largely due to the fact that whilst the PS3 rules the roost in Japan, with much higher sales, the Xbox 360 has been on a run of winning sales figures across North America. To top off their previous announcement, Sony also added that they have shipped an additional 8 million Move peripheral units. In the battle of the motion controllers though, Kinect wins hands down, with over 10 million units sold – and that figure was released three months ago in January.

The PlayStation 3 numbers were calculated on 29th March and the Move ones on 3rd April.