14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has released some new sales numbers for the PlayStation 2 home gaming console launched nine years ago this week. The Japanese manufacturer is saying that there are more than 140 million PS2 consoles sold to gamers all over the world, with one in three American households having one of them.
The device is still being sold on major gaming markets, with a price tag that has reached 99 dollars and there are still people buying new ones, either to replace older ones or to get a cheap system.
Sony is saying that the 140 million units sold make the PlayStation 2 the best sold gaming platform in history, beating the Nintendo DS, which has reached 108 million in sales, and the Game Boy, which sits at about 119 million.
The Nintendo manufactured DS and its variants are still selling strong and could at one point overtake the PS2. Sony is also saying that there are close to 10,000 videogames released for the PS2 by about 485 developers, all of them selling close to half a billion copies in the United States alone.
One of the reasons for the continued sales of the nine-year-old console is the fact that Sony has not introduced a full legacy mode in the newer PlayStation 3 in order to allow it to play older games. This might have troubled those who had to play old favorites on old hardware but has certainly extended the lifetime of the PS2, which otherwise might have been declared dead to the videogames world about two years ago.
If the PlayStation 2 manages to hold on for another year, then it will also lend a lot of power to Sony's arguments that the home gaming consoles it creates are planned with a life cycle of ten years in mind, featuring a lot of computing power that can be unlocked as time goes by.