Sony’s PlayStation 4 races past 40M sales

Sony continues to impress with the PS4 after the games console passed 40 million sales worldwide to date. That looks to be a lot more than the competition. Unofficial statistician VGChartz pegs Microsoft’s Xbox One and Nintendo’s WiiU at 20.99 million and 13.11 million sales respectively.

The PS4 clocked 30 million units back in November, so it has added 10 million more over the past six months. That’s actually faster than the eight months that it took to go from 20 million to 30 million sales, and that bodes well for Sony going forward.

Sony said also that it has sold more than 270.9 million copies of PS4 games — both physical and digital downloads — since it launched in November 2013. The console was initially available in North America first, before expanding to Europe, South America and Australia weeks later. Japan, Sony’s home market, wasn’t included until February 2014 and China wasn’t covered until March 2015, albeit with a very limited slate of titles initially.

“We are truly grateful for the enormous support from our fans and partners across the globe, which helped us achieve this significant milestone in such a short span of time,” said Andrew House, President and Global CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in a statement.

Sony isn’t done with the PlayStation 4 just yet either.

It recently added remote play for PC and Mac and it is set to introduce its VR headset — PlayStation VR — in October. There’s much expectation around the device in part because it is priced at a very competitive $399, and also because it requires the PS4 and not an expensive PC setup like much of the early competition. Then there’s the added bonus of Sony and PlayStation’s gaming heritage and links with game-makers, so you can expect a lot of quality titles from the get-go.

Away from the console, Sony is following Nintendo’s lead after it revealed plans to bring some PlayStation titles to mobile in the form of iOS and Android apps.