With the dawn of the next generation PlayStation 4 almost upon us, Sony took some time today to toot the horn of the PlayStation 3 by announcing that life-to-date shipments of the console have surpassed 80 million units worldwide.
The updated total means that Sony has moved approximately 10 million units of the seven-year-old PlayStation 3 over the course of the last twelve months. Additionally, they still appear to be running neck and neck with Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which hit 80 million units shipped worldwide last month.
Of course, it is hard to take this new data and translate it into exactly how the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 stack up in terms of actual users. The number shipped to retailers does not reveal how many have found their way into good homes, nor does it account for how many of those systems are still functional — which in the case of early model Xbox 360 units could be a rather significant factor.
At any rate, Sony also revealed that the total number of “software titles” released for the PlayStation 3 now stands at 4,332. Amazingly, this does not seem to include any “download software titles.” Assuming there is not any trickery with how Sony calculated the total, that makes for one hell of a software library.
