There's an interesting little tidbit contained in a recent video from Sony encouraging third-party manufacturers to make Playstation peripherals. In total, what we can consider the "current" Playstation platforms -- Vita, PS4 and PS3 -- have hit up to 100 million sales. That's a solid ecosystem.
Of course, we can assume that the vast majority of those sales come from the PS3, which had a significant headstart on those other machines. The last update from PS4 was in April, when it passed the 7 million mark, and the continuing supply shortage indicates that sales are still going up fairly quickly. IGN estimates that with 80 million PS3s sold as of last November, Vita might be hovering somewhere around 10 million. Sony tends to be less forthright on the sales for the embattled Vita.
The PS4 is recovering somewhat from a long period of supply issues and, now that E3 is over, eyes are once again on the holiday season -- the second Christmas is a crucial moment for any new console, but we've seen a huge number of delays from first and third-party current-gen games for both systems. One wonders how that will effect potential buyers still inclined to wait for big name exclusives before plunking down the money. It might actually make a good moment for Nintendo and the Wii U...
The idea of the Playstation ecosystem is especially interesting because that seems to be what Sony wants for the brand. Between the PS4, the Vita and the upcoming Playstation TV, a committed Sony fan could build out quite an elaborate gaming system spread out across several screens and built around the local computing power of the PS4. That system only grows once we add Playstation Now and Project Morpheus -- and while we haven't heard anything specific about the "lifestyle" category that Andrew House was talking about recently, it's not unreasonable to assume.
Sony hasn't been shy about using the Playstation brand as the figurehead for a new era in the company's history, and it appears to be doing so through a tightly linked network of devices. It's something of a walled garden, which makes sense given Sony's primary identity as a hardware company. It's also an interesting counterpoint to Microsoft, which wants to expand the Xbox brand by further integrating it with mobile devices and its Windows operating system.
