Yesterday evening Mat Piscatella of NPD shared with his followers on Twitter a series of very interesting data on the sales performance of consoles in the United States of America.

The analyst said that after 68 months on the market PlayStation 4 turns out to be the third best-selling console in history in the US, behind only the results recorded by Wii and PS2 in the same time frame. The information has been defined as “time aligned”, in the sense that the first 68 months of marketing have been taken into account for all consoles. In other words, in the time window taken into consideration, PS4 is the third console sold faster than ever. Xbox 360 and Xbox One are fourth and fifth respectively.

For Nintendo Switch, a much younger console than the Sony counterpart, the same reasoning was applied as above, but taking into consideration the first 28 months of sales. In this time band, the hybrid turns out to be the fourth best-selling console ever in the USA, behind Wii, PS2, and PS4.

Mat Piscatella was keen to point out that these results are indicative only of the sales momentum, and that the final results could be different, as happened with Xbox 360. The Microsoft console, fourth after 68 months, ended its run in second place behind PS2 surpassing overall Wii sales.

According to the latest data available, PS4 has exceeded 96.8 million units distributed globally, while Nintendo Switch is at 34.74 million units sold. We do not know the precise data of Xbox One since Microsoft does not share them.