14 DAY TRIAL // At Gamescom 2014 last week, Sony announced that the PlayStation 4 had already sold over 10 million units to consumers all across the world since its launch in November 2013.
In spite of many claiming that consoles would be dead, the Playstation 4 managed to become the fastest-selling console of all time, marking an impressive success for Sony.
So impressive, in fact, that even the company's very own Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Worldwide Studios boss, can't even believe and understand what's happening.
"The 10m sell through in the first nine months is well beyond what we had hoped for. It's just beyond our imagination. We are so happy. But I for one am a bit nervous because we do not completely understand what's happening. You need to understand why your products are selling well so you can plan for the future, right? It defied the conventional thinking," Yoshida tells Eurogamer.
He states that, surprisingly, the PlayStation 4 was adopted by a rather large number of people who didn't already have a PlayStation 3, who skipped over the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii generation.
"Some of the early data was amazing in terms of the number of people who didn't used to own PS3 have already purchased PS4. So we are getting lots of new customers coming into PlayStation. And some people never purchased any last-gen hardware: PS3, or Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii. So where did they come from?" Yoshida wonders.
The PlayStation 4 managed to sell 10 million units in only nine months, with an official presence in over 70 countries all around the globe, and Yoshida admits that he's also confused by the console's success, which can also be attributed to the great games announced at E3 and various other game shows, building interest in the new generation of hardware.
But the staggering success of the console, combined with the lower, but still solid number of Xbox One consoles (5 million at last tally, in April 2014), also makes Yoshida worry about the future.
"As soon as we see a great sales number, our instinct tells us we should be concerned about future sales, right? Are we exhausting all the core gamers? If we sell this number of units, there are no more consumers we can sell to. That's a really terrifying prospect."
"So we want to understand who are these consumers who we do not necessarily consider core gamers, who are purchasing PS4 and why they are doing it and what they are doing with PS4, so we can create a bit more of a positive future, rather than saying, wow, we have sold to every single core gamer. So that's what we are doing," Yoshida explains.
With continued support and development teams working every day to add new features and improve the PlayStation 4 firmware, as well as the network services and game catalogue, Sony hopes to be able to continue to ride this momentum and reach an even wider audience than it did with the PlayStation 3, a console that sold over 80 million units since its release in 2006.