PS4 sales pass 25 million mark as Sony crushes competition from Microsoft and Nintendo

Sony has announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold 25.3 million units worldwide, helping the Japanese company's profits more than triple during the first quarter of its fiscal year. Net profit rose to 82.4bn yen (£425m) while operating profit rose to 96.8bn yen.

The PS4 sold approximately 3 million units in the three months to the end of June, up from 2.7 million during the same period last year. Sony has also increased its sales forecast for the PS4 from 16 million to 16.5 million for this fiscal year, meaning they expect to hit nearly 39 million cumulative sales by the end of March 2016.

Sony's home console competitors are certainly lagging behind. Nintendo's Wii U, which was released one year before the PS4, recently broke 10 million units, while Microsoft's Xbox One recently topped 13 million sales worldwide.

While the gulf between PS4 and Xbox One seems huge, sales of Microsoft's consoles are still strong and exceeding those of its tremendously successful predecessor the Xbox 360 – which during the same period sold 9.3 million units.

Sony's PS4 has reached the milestone without many particularly strong or popular exclusives – selling primarily on the strength of its brand name, its launch price and the folly of Microsoft's Xbox One launch.

Its own array of exclusives has been relatively weak, with no runaway commercial successes and only Bloodborne as a critical success, but its 2016 is looking very strong – which could bolster its sales even further. Right now it has Street Fighter 5, Uncharted 4, No Man's Sky, Ratchet and Clank and the Project Morpheus virtual reality headset all in the pipeline for release early on in the year.

We don't yet know what Sony has up its sleeve for the second half of 2016, other than (hopefully) The Last Guardian.

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