After selling its entire stock of PlayStation 4 units, including an additional allotment granted at the last minute by Sony, GameStop still has 2.3 million people on the mailing list waiting to be informed when more units arrive, according to GI.biz.
The news came from GameStop CFO Robert Lloyd during a recent earnings call. Lloyd would not give out specific sales numbers, but confirmed that GameStop sold 80-percent more PS4s during the launch than it sold PS3s during all of the 2006 fiscal year. PlayStation Plus subscriptions also sold especially well.
“When you look at all of the PlayStation Plus subscriptions we’ve sold in our lifetime, and we’ve been selling them for years, a full one-third of all the subscriptions we’ve sold in our lifetime were sold in the last seven days,” GameStop’s President Tony Bartel said.
Of course, people simply signing up to find out when more PS4s will be in stock is not the same as people actively putting money down on the system, but it is still good news for Sony. The PS4 moved 1 million units in 24 hours in North America alone, and the European launch – where Sony has dominated Microsoft over the last decade – is still to come. The rest of the world will follow in staggered releases, culminating with Japan on February 22.
GameStop also confirmed that the sales figures for the Xbox One were also looking very good. Microsoft’s new hardware is on track to sell 15 percent more units during its launch than the Xbox 360 sold during its first fiscal year.
The final sales numbers for both systems are likely going to be withheld for the next few weeks, if not months. But regardless of what system you intend to pick up, it’s good news for gamers and the gaming industry as a whole … except, perhaps, Nintendo. The Wii U, by comparison, has sold just 3.91 million units worldwide in just over a year since its launch.
