As of today, April 1st, Jim Ryan is no longer officially part of the PlayStation top. The former Sony boss said goodbye to the gamers in a podcast on the PlayStation blog where they reviewed Ryan’s entire career at the company: more than 30 years, from the first Sony PlayStation offices in Europe right after the launch of the first model until day.
A history of the medium, no doubt about it, but which has left a rather surprising note as an epilogue: Ryan claims that the PS2 (the best-selling console in history) sold 160 million and not 155 million, as the official figures from Sony itself (whose latest data on this hardware is from 2012) claim. But are these numbers real, or did Ryan want to exploit them to generate one last media storm? It is difficult to say, even if the user ZhugeEX from Nico Partners has done a fairly detailed investigation of the matter in a thread on X/Twitter.
The main point of the survey is that nine months have passed since the last official data and the closure of the PlayStation 2 (up to January 2013). It is also weighted based on official PS3 distribution data during the first months of its coexistence. The estimates suggest that, in the absence of official figures other than Ryan’s words, the PlayStation 2 actually reached 159.1 million copies, significantly increasing the lead of the Nintendo DS and setting a new goal for the Nintendo Switch, which had hoped to take the top spot by 2024 .
What do you think, is Jim Ryan telling the truth?
