It’s not just about all the hardware sales

Sony has revealed that the number of games the average person buys for their PS4 is more than any other console in history.

When you sell your console at a loss hardware sales aren’t really that important, it’s how many games people buy for it. That’s what the software attach rate indicates, and it seems it’s unusually high for the PlayStation 4.

Sony recently announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold 53.4 million consoles worldwide, roughly twice that of the Xbox One. But what has also just been revealed is that over 401 million games have been sold – which allows you to calculate the attach rate.



Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirms the rate as 7.51 games per console, which is higher than both the PlayStation 2 and Wii at the same point in their life cycle.


The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console of all time and had a 6.2 attach rate when its sales hit 50 million. The Wii is the third best-selling (just behind the PlayStation 1) and was on 7.1 when it hit the same milestone.

As you see the attach rate is not directly proportional to hardware sales and depends on a lot of very different factors.

The PlayStation 2 though is at a disadvantage because cheaper indie games and other digital downloads didn’t exist in its lifetime, so that will have helped inflate the PlayStation 4 figure.

Even so, it’s a hugely impressive achievement and shows that the PlayStation 4 is well on course to being one of the most successful video game consoles of all time.

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