Seven years on, PlayStation 3 reaches 80M units sold

Sony has announced that its outgoing PlayStation 3 console has surpassed 80 million sales, as of November 2nd of this year. First launched in Japan on November 11th, 2006, the milestone lands just shy of the console's seventh year anniversary. In terms of performance, this puts PS3 ahead of Microsoft's Xbox 360, which reported reaching 80 million units last month but launched a full year earlier, in November 2005. However, both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 fall in well behind the Nintendo Wii, which launched against the PS3 in November 2006 and has sold 100 million units worldwide to date. And none of the outgoing console generation hardware have managed to approach the record still held by Sony's PlayStation 2, which had sold 155 million units when its manufacture was discontinued earlier this year, after 12 years in production. Publisher heavyweight Electronic Arts recently predicted that Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One will collectively move 10 million units by next April, which would serve as a strong start for both consoles. Sony's PlayStation 4 launches in North America on November 15th and on November 29th in Europe and Australia.