Sony PS4 SHATTERS UK console sales SPEED RECORD

The PS4 is officially the UK’s fastest-selling games console. Ever.

Numbers released to insiders yesterday by GfK Chart-Track, which monitors over-the-counter sales of games hardware and software using sales figures supplied by retailers (not manufacturers), show some 250,000 UK-based punters snapped up a PS4 during the first 48 hours of the next-gen console’s availability in the Britain.

The data was soon leaked to games paper MCV.

Chart-Track’s figures - as official as it gets - put the PS4’s debut well ahead of Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), which racked up sales of 185,000 during its opening weekend back in September 2005.

The new console pushed its predecessor, the PS3, into third place in the chart of fastest-selling consoles. The third PlayStation machine was bought by 165,000 gamers when it went on sale on 23 March 2007.

Last week, The Register revealed that some 150,000 Xbox One consoles had been purchased during the Microsoft machine’s first 48 hours of availability.

Microsoft apologists insisted this was only to be expected. "How could the One beat the PS3 when it was launched during an economic downturn, and the Sony machine was released in the boom years?" they said. "And didn’t lots of people buy the PS3 solely to get their hands on a cheap Blu-ray Disc player?"

The success of the PS4 certainly confounds the former argument, and it’s hard to see the latter applying now the that standalone BD players can be had for as little as 20-50 quid. ®