It’s hard to believe that Sony is still manufacturing and selling new PS2 units, more than three years after its successor went on sale. But the cheap, impulse-buy console continues to celebrate sales and has just passed it latest milestone.
As of January 31, total sales of the Playstation 2 console have topped 150 million, Sony announced. That is over the entire span of the system’s life, which is now greater than 11 years.
Prior to the PS2, the typical life span of a video game console was 4-5 years, if the manufacturer was lucky. That even held true for the PS2 competitors Xbox and Gamecube. Those systems stopped production about a half decade after they were released.
That is not the case with Sony’s ubiquitous gaming device, which miraculously still receives support from game developers, though that support has been dropping in recent years.
Sony also said that more than 1.5 billion PS2 games have been sold worldwide, and the total number of titles in the system’s catalog have reached a mind-blowingly staggering 10,828.
The PS2, of course, revolutionized gaming by becoming the first commercially successful console to use disc-based media instead of cartridges, introducing the rumble feature to a controller, and integrating DVD movie playback into the device.
New PS2 units now sell for less than $100, making it the perfect buy for cash-strapped consumers.
Sony said it will “continue to further expand the PlayStation platform and create a new world of computer entertainment.”
