Last modified on October 7th, 2023 at 7:20 pm
The best selling video game consoles in history
We've listed all sales numbers of video game consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Find out who sold the most consoles here.
The very first video game console that was ever sold commercially was the Magnavox Odyssey, released back in 1972. Since then there has been a huge variety of video game consoles on the market from various different companies. Today, that market is almost entirely monopolized by the big three dominating game companies: Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. In this article, we take a look at the bestselling video game consoles sold by these three companies and rank them by their sales numbers.
If you’re only here to read up on the ten most-sold video game consoles, here they are:
- Playstation 2 – 155 million units
- Nintendo DS – 154 million units
- Nintendo Switch – 129 million units
- Game Boy & Game Boy Color – 118 million units
- Playstation 4 – 117 million units
- Playstation – 102 million units
- Wii – 101 million units
- Playstation 3 – 87 million units
- Xbox 360 – 84 million units
- Game Boy Advance – 81 million units
This is the top ten list as of October 2023.
Are you still here? Then let us keep going.
Top 12 Most sold Nintendo consoles
You may already have put two and two together by scanning through the top 10 list in the section above, but Nintendo’s five most-sold consoles are all in the top ten. The Switch is still selling loads of copies today and probably will keep selling a lot of copies up until Nintendo’s next generation console comes out, rumored sometime next year.
- Nintendo DS – 154 million units
- Nintendo Switch – 129 million units – (Current generation)
- Game Boy & Game Boy Color – 118 million units
- Wii – 101 million units
- Game Boy Advance – 81 million units
- Nintendo 3DS – 75 million units
- NES/Famicom – 61 million units
- SNES/Super Famicom – 49 million units
- Game & Watch – 43 million units
- Nintendo 64 – 32 million units
- GameCube – 21 million units
- Wii U – 13 million units
Top 4 most sold Microsoft consoles
Microsoft entered the console market in 2001. That is when they introduced their first video game console: The Xbox. Since then, Microsoft has released 3 more consoles, including the newest in the series: Xbox Series X/S.
- Xbox 360 – 84 million units or more
- Xbox One – around 58 million units
- Xbox – 24 million units
- Xbox Series X/S – around 21 million units – (Current generation)
Top 7 most sold Sony consoles
Ever since the first PlayStation was released in 1994, Sony has with no doubt, pretty much dominated the console market. The only exception would be the portable Playstation Vita with its merely 15 million units sold worldwide.
- PlayStation 2 – 155 million units
- PlayStation 4 – 117 million units
- PlayStation – 102 million units
- PlayStation 3 – 87 million units
- PlayStation Portable – 80-82 million units
- PlayStation 5 – 41 million units – (Current generation)
- PlayStation Vita – 10-15 million units
Keep in mind though, that there are more video game consoles out there from other companies such as Sega, Atari, Commodore, and more. But these companies have abandoned the modern video game console market and that is why they are not included in these lists. Maybe that is something to rediscover in a future post?
