Sony Announces 18.5 Million PS4 Consoles Sold Since Launch

Hot on the heels of revealing its pricing and public release date of its game streaming service, PlayStation Now, Sony has announced that it has sold over 18.5 million PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles since its inception a year ago. This is a drastic improvement over the 13.5 million PS4 consoles sold at the end of October 2014.

In addition to this, Sony stated that there are 10.9 million subscribers for PlayStation Plus, a service which grants users free digital games each month and the ability to play online. This is up from the 7.9 million from October 2014.

The news comes after the company's PlayStation Network (PSN) was hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from hackers who brought it down from December 24 to December 29.

For an embattled consumer electronics company that is set to see its fifth year of losses in the last six years, due to stagnant sales of TVs and smartphones, the performance of the PS4 is the solitary silver lining.

While we're yet to see Microsoft or Nintendo announce how their holiday sales have been, it's not too unreasonable to believe that they haven't done too badly what with the Xbox One available at a deep discount for the last few months and the Wii U sporting some solid system selling software in Super Smash Bros. Wii U and Mario Kart 8.

Here in India, thanks to Nintendo not present officially and the Xbox One not doing as well as it should, the PS4 has gone from strength to strength. The console is slated to hit 50,000 units sold by the end of this financial year.