Kerboom! That's the sound of Sony making a decent-sized dent in the console gaming market. According to company representatives, Sony sold more than one million units of the PlayStation 4 within the first 24 hours of the console's life. For those not keeping track, that's roughly Friday through Saturday.
The news covers the 31 countries (including the U.S. and Canada) that officially started selling (or sending) the PlayStation 4 console on Friday. Next up on the PlayStation 4's calendar is its launch date for Latin America, Australia, and Europe on November 29, followed by a (much) later launch in Japan on February 22 of next year.
An excited executive, Sony Computer Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida, delivered the sales news via a Twitter post early Sunday morning.
"PS4 has sold through over 1 million units within 24 hours of the launch in North America!!! :D," he wrote.
Sony has predicted that it'll push out a total of five million PlayStation consoles by March of next year. If true, that'll beat sales of the PlayStation 3 in a similar time frame by approximately 1.5 million.
And the PlayStation's success should certainly help contribute to a bit of a turnaround in the console videogame market as a whole, which has felt as if it's been on a bit of a pause prior to the big console launches from Sony and Microsoft this month.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, market research firm PwC is calling for a 4.2% increase in worldwide game sales this year – from last year's $24.93 billion to $25.98 billion. That higher figure should then jump 6.4% in 2014 to a final total of $27.62 billion.
New consoles, as one might expect, help the sales cycle. Or at least, they have in the past – back in 2007, one to two years after the big launches of the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PlayStation 3, console video game sales jumped up 28%. PwC believes that the next few years won't see quite as big of a spike, but growth nevertheless, assuming that both Microsoft and Sony can keep interest (and sales) at the same levels (or higher) compared to previous console launches.
Of course, some of the one million new owners of Sony's latest console have been a bit unlucky. Check out our previous reporting on some of the issues new PS4 owners have been having, in addition to some of the crazier reports from the big PlayStation 4 launch day this past Friday.