Over the weekend, an unexpected PS2 lifetime sales update by former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan sparked an unusual debate. In his final appearance on the PlayStation Blog podcast, Ryan said that the PS2 sold 160 million units in its lifespan — a figure that some are finding hard to digest.
Why Jim Ryan’s PS2 sales update is being debated
Sony officially lists PS2’s lifetime sales figure as more than 155 million as of March 31, 2012. There have been no official updates since. What a lot of folks are missing here is the fact that the PS2 was still in production until January 2013, and while we were inching closer to the PS4 at the time, the PS2 was still in the market.
Some people find it curious that Ryan would drop the figure of 160 million during his farewell podcast, but as Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad points out, Sony revealed that it had sold more PS2s than PS3s between April and December 2012. The company didn’t provide a sales breakdown but did say that it sold 16.5 million units of the PS2 and PS3 combined.
Over on Twitter, Ahmad did some rough math using official data and came to a “theoretical range” of 158.6 million – 161.8 million PS2s sold, so Ryan’s figure of 160 million is an odd thing to debate.
