{"id":8485,"date":"2022-04-05T10:45:45","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T17:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/?p=8485"},"modified":"2023-02-03T09:29:11","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T16:29:11","slug":"video-game-sales-all-time-nintendo-vs-playstation-hardware-and-software-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/2022\/04\/05\/video-game-sales-all-time-nintendo-vs-playstation-hardware-and-software-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Video Game Sales: All-time Nintendo vs. PlayStation Hardware and Software Sales!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello everyone, two months ago Paul Gale Network created this article<\/a>, which was a compilation of Nintendo’s all-time, total video game hardware and software that was sold, in addition to this article<\/a>, which did the same for PlayStation.

Today, we look at the two, head to head!

Nintendo Hardware:<\/strong>

1) Nintendo DS \u2013 154.02m
2) Game Boy \u2013 118.69m
3) Nintendo Switch \u2013 103.54m
4) Wii \u2013 101.63
5) Game Boy Advance \u2013 81.51m
6) Nintendo 3DS \u2013 75.94m
7) Nintendo Entertainment System \u2013 61.91m
8) Super Nintendo Entertainment System \u2013 49.10m
9) Nintendo 64 \u2013 32.93m
10) Nintendo GameCube \u2013 21.74m
11) Wii U \u2013 13.56m
12) Virtual Boy \u2013 .77+m (This is the last Virtual Boy figure provided, though it did sell after. How much exactly is unknown.)

Total Nintendo hardware from the above consoles =\u00a0815.34 million<\/strong>

PlayStation Hardware:<\/strong>

1) PlayStation 2 \u2013 157.68m
2) PlayStation 4 \u2013 116.9m
3) PlayStation \u2013 102.4m
4) PlayStation 3 \u2013 87.4m
5) PSP \u2013 76.4m
6) PlayStation 5 \u2013 17.2m
7) PS Vita \u2013 13.8m

Total hardware sold from the above consoles =\u00a0571.8 million<\/strong>

It wouldn’t be enough to just provide the above, however, because most know that Nintendo entered the video game industry first. The following is a comparison between the two companies and how much hardware they moved on average, per year, for the amount of years they have been active.

Famicom (Japan\u2019s NES) released on July 15th, 1983.
From July, \u201983 to December, \u201921: 38 years and 5 months (38.416 years) have passed, with 815,340,000 consoles being sold.

This is an average of\u00a021,223,969<\/strong>\u00a0Nintendo consoles<\/strong>\u00a0being sold per year during that time.

PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3rd, 1994.
From July, \u201994 to December, \u201921: 27 years and 28 days (27.07 years) have passed, with 571,780,000 consoles being sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an average of\u00a021,122,275 PlayStation consoles\u00a0<\/strong>being sold per year during that time.

With Nintendo’s 38 year history on the market and PlayStation’s 27, it makes sense that Nintendo sold more hardware in total, but what’s really interesting is to see that the average number of consoles sold per year for the two, is actually quite close. It should be noted that the first PlayStation did not launch outside of Japan, until 9 months later, when it came to North America and Europe. Adjusting the numbers would help Sony’s lifetime by a small percentage. On the Nintendo side, the NES didn’t come out in North America until a full 2 years and 3 months after Famicom (and in other territories, the gap was even larger). If you include the total sales, but reduce the years to beginning with the NES and not the Famicom, Nintendo’s lifetime average becomes 22,544,378<\/strong>\u00a0a year, which is a considerable bump.

For Nintendo, the software average from July, 1983 to December, 2021, after having sold 5 billion, 320.6 million<\/strong> over that time, is\u00a0138,499,583 games\u00a0<\/strong>sold per year.<\/strong>
For PlayStation, the software average from December, 1994 to December, 2021, after having sold 5 billion, 559.4<\/strong> million over that time =\u00a0205,371,259 games<\/strong>\u00a0sold per year.

This is an interesting stat, but does require some additional analysis. Unlike what we saw above with hardware, Nintendo’s 11 year head start did not make it the winner in the total software sales sold department. Even if you include the total Nintendo software, but begin with the NES in October of 1985 (reducing the time by 2 years and 3 months), the company’s average is 147,116,075 games<\/strong>\u00a0sold per year, which is still far lower than PlayStation’s. Why is this? One reason could be that more software has existed on PlayStation hardware, in terms of both volume of titles available and actual discs printed. The other reason could be because Sony includes every single digital sale, including titles available also at retail, those that are digital only, and “single dollar” releases. It is likely a combination of both truths, but on the Nintendo side of things, we know that the company does not include “all digital sales”. It would be interesting to see the two companies more accurately stacked up against one another in the software department, but this is as accurate as we can get for now.

Based off the 5,320,600,000 units of software and 815,340,000 units of hardware that have been sold as of December 31st, 2021, 6.5 to 1<\/strong> is the ratio of software to hardware across Nintendo\u2019s entire history.
Based off the 5,559,400,000 units of software and 571,780,000 units of hardware that have been sold as of December 31st, 2021, 9.72 to 1<\/strong> is the ratio of software to hardware across PlayStation\u2019s entire history.

Both original articles are available below and like them, this head to head was a lot of fun putting together. Thank you reading along and have a great one!

Source: Nintendo stats<\/a>
Source: PlayStation stats<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello everyone, two months ago Paul Gale Network created this article, which was a compilation of Nintendo’s all-time, total video game hardware and software that was sold, in addition to this article, which did the same for PlayStation. Today, we look at the two, head to head! Nintendo Hardware: 1) Nintendo DS \u2013 154.02m2) Game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[165],"tags":[20,3175,3176,3179,9,39,286,1482,3177,3178,253,3025],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8485"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8743,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485\/revisions\/8743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulgalenetwork.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}