Genuinely surprised that nothing old-school made the list: NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, A2600, etc.
The NES was the best selling of those, at ~60 million. The PS1 completely changed the curve.
It’s funny. People remember the PS3 as a failure because it’s the worst-selling PlayStation, but it still crushed NES numbers
And it still outsold the 360 in the end
I’m actually surprised that the PS5 is right behind Xbox 360 and PS3
It’s actually a good option now when PC gaming is suffering of price crisis after price crisis.
Not sure this pricing crisis will not have an impact on consoles, too
Consoles can and sometimes are subsidised, while PCs cannot.
i think series x is a better option because theres an easy way to emulate anything you want on it
They should put that on the box.
I’m actually shocked how low 360/ps3 are.
I felt like everyone I know has at least owned one, and they where more consoles where actually used as Netflix boxes back then out of necessity due to lack of good smart TVs or set top boxes.
Plus they had an extra 5 years of being around, not to count the fact most early adopters bought another twice, especially with the 360 due to RROD.
Looks like the data is a little out of date, seems the PS5 has outsold the 360 now. Also why are handhelds missing?
Handhelds aren’t technically consoles.
Wikipedia seems to think they are. I’ve seen “home consoles” used when you want to exclude handhelds, what makes you say that they’re technically not consoles?
Plus the Switch is a handheld, which makes it a weird distinction to make.
The Siwtch is not a handheld, unless you count the Switch Lite into those sales. You can perfectly use a Switch as a home console.
I count it as a handheld because every switch can be used as a handheld, while not every switch can be used as a home console.
Why wouldn’t the Switch Lite be counted in those sales? It’s the same device, sans detachable controllers and docking capabilities.
It’s like calling a phone that you can plug into a monitor with peripherals a “desktop”
Agreed, the steam deck belongs on this list or the switch doesn’t.
The steam deck has unfortunately sold a tiny fraction of the sales of the consoles listed in the image. I can’t find any exact numbers but the steam deck has sold between 4 to 6 million units.
As of last year, I’ve used all the bestselling consoles on here. They’re all pretty good.
Microsoft really shit the bed. And then continued to do so. This makes me happy.
oh great, ai generated pixel art.
Oh great, another dumbass on an anti-AI witch hunt.
ok so theyre just bad at it.
I think it looks just fine to me, but then again, I don’t have OCD or such a vendetta against AI that I feel the need to spend 10 minutes analyzing every image I see on the internet to decide if it used AI.
maybe i do then because i just keep staring and thinking “how in the world did anyone sign off on this mess”. if it’s not ai, that makes it even worse.
What exactly about it is a mess? Are the figures inaccurate? Does it fail to convey the information? If the answer to either of those questions is no, then anything else you feel like anally dissecting is completely irrelevant.
the graphics are ass, and the text is hard to read
What about the graphics are “ass”? Would you not be able to identify the console if the name wasn’t next to it? I will give you the text being hard to read, but that’s minor, and I can read it ok. Point remains though, just wildly jumping to “this is AI” when you see something you don’t like is just dumb as fuck.
Shut up and keep your mouth wide
Which is AI-generated? It looks to me like real pixel art (except the 360) very lazily resized in a non-nearest-neighbor fractional scale and anti-aliased to mush.
the proportions are off and the lines are crooked. there’s also the typical latent noise on places like the controller buttons.
Sorry, none of this is a clear indicator of AI. The “latent noise” you refer to is perfectly consistent with compression and resizing artifacting and noise. Proportions are often off when making “chibi” icon-sized consoles, but notably, they are consistently or coherently off. Other features are strongly suggestive it isn’t AI. For example:
- All of the controllers have consistent layouts, including the correct number and orientation of buttons, player indicators, etc (e.g., the Wii controllers).
- Consistent diagonal step effects, even if blurred from poor resizing (see the PS4).
- Consistent text for all system indicators that is legible without AI artifacting, even if blurred from poor resizing.
- The fact that the 360 and PS3 (didn’t notice initially) are not even pixel art suggests they just grabbed random icons from the web, not ran them through AI generators.
Visual Capitalist says they make all their own graphics (so not just grabbed from the Web) from a “veriaty of tools from Adobe Creative Cloud”.
Adobe has been making a huge push for so-called “AI tools” in their Creative Cloud service.
Ok - Yes, Adobe does have insidiously integrated AI tools. But again, nothing you point to here is strongly indicative of AI, and again, just consistent with sloppy & lazy resizing (which you could just as likely see pre-2020, before AI). Adobe also has a very extensive stock library which may be where these came from.
There are some really hard to spot AI generated materials possible now, but the sloppy inconsistency here is - conversely - an indicator that they don’t care much what we do or don’t notice so wouldn’t be spending the time to generate something with all of the consistent details (see list above). Instead, the consistent details suggest human-created versions based on the real systems.
And a couple of them (PS3, 360) aren’t even pixelated.
And the ps2 controller is unsymmetrical.

Ps3 in chatgpt font,

Its very obvious for the ps1.
Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this?
What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.
For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.
If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.

I don’t understand you defending ai art, but here, the extremely obvious odd coloring texturing the surface of the ps1 would be enough for anyone to notice, but the generation error in the top is proof. This smudge line is where the ai failed on its final pass, likely to do with clipskip or whatever crap open ai uses as this is clearly open ai’s image model.
Why are you defending ai art so hard, what do you get from defending a massive cooperation?
Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.
I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).
The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.
I for the life of me cannot believe that a nsfw account is arguing with me about confidence while not giving an inkling of evidence themselves. You know nothing of AI “art” and it shows.

Here is a ps3 i generated from chatgpt just now, it details every single thing you stated. The prompt was: “Generate me a Playstation 3 pixel art image”
If you aren’t willing to give even an inkling of proof to your claims, or even try to show proof when talking about jpeg errors then you have no grounds to stand on.
You are defending ai art, weather you realize it or not.
Super obvious AI signals:
- buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
- there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
- the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.
Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.
Who fucking gives a shit? This is literally the most harmless “ai slop” you can get. Stop crying.
It’s always amusing when the most hysterical person in the room tells you you’re overacting.
Everyone but you, asshole.
I also don’t give a shit. Also bear in mind that Lemmy is a microcosm of the fediverse, which in turn is a super microcosm of the internet in general. So no, not “everyone”.
k
really? How can you tell? :(
the buttons on the switch and ps2, the asymmetry of the ps1 and switch, the logo on the ps4, and the lack of pixellation and strange proportions of the 360 and ps3. also the fact that only some of them have controllers depicted.
Sorry again, I know I responded below and not trying to just argue for no reason, but pointing out these different things you’re identifying that actually strongly suggest these aren’t AI, or aren’t indicators of AI or not either way.
For example, Switch asymmetry. This is how Switch directional and gamepad buttons look. It should be asymmetrical, and AI probably wouldn’t get that right like it is in the graphic. You can even see the color-distorted remainder of the “-” and “+” symbols above them, blurred to hell from terrible resizing.
Things like proportions and whether controllers are depicted are just choices either a human or an AI could make.
for the asymmetry on the switch i was mostly referring to the silhouette. should havj clarified that.
The fact that some of the icons are not pixelated is a huge ai red flag, no designer would make that weird mistake.
And by far the most obvious: many of the Pixels are not square, or misaligned with the grid pattern, and they also have wildly different sizes on some of the consoles
piss filter
Removed by mod
I’d be interested to see how sales of the steam deck compare. Sure, it’s a pc not a console, but the whole thing is to bring pc gaming to console gamers so I’m interested in the comparison.
EDIT: based on a quick search, 4 million as of this time last year. I did not find anything more up to date than that. Looking that up made me realize that it would be nice if this chart had a date on it since two of the consoles in the chart are still in production.
Damn… That’s a bit disappointing to hear… I thought people loved the steam deck.
I think people think it runs way fewer games than it does. I keep updating proton, etc, and like 99% of my games work. Hell, I have all my DS and Switch games on there.
Switch being #2 behind PS2 is impressive given it has had a shorter lifespan. PS2 was on the market for 13 years. Switch has only been 9.
COVID bump
Switch has a good chance of overtaking PS2 before the end of its lifespan. The Switch is still selling and still getting game releases.
I think the PS2 being so well sold is more impressive because the price adjusted for inflation is closer to $560, or $299 in the year 2000.
I think part of it was the idea that it could also be a DVD player so you wouldn’t need two devices that helped sell it if I recall correctly.
I remember that was the case for PS3 and BluRay, but not so much DVD and the PS2. PS3 was, what, $300? $400? Where as the cheapest BluRay player that just played BluRay movies was almost a grand.
I may just not remember it being similar for PS2. I was a sophmore in high school when it came out.
That was absolutely true for ps2 and DVD. They were trying to recapture it with ps3 and blu ray and with less success.
The PS3 was stupid expensive at launch, like $600 in 2006, nearly $1000 in 2026 dollars. But yeah I think that argument was made then also.
I think the PS2 was marketed specifically for DVD capabilities in some cases, I remember an IR dongle and remote control they sold so you didn’t have to use a controller.
Stem deck >>>>>> Those.
Heh, still have my PS2 and I still play on it. And it’s still fun :D
I didn’t know Xbox was so low compared to Playstation, no wonder there’s rumor Microsoft will drop console making.
The reason for the high sales of the PS2 was because it was a cheap DVD player at being nearly half the price of a stand alone DVD player.
Funny by the time I worked at Target when they discontinued selling VHS and a customer was arguing with me about why did we stop selling VHS and I replied, “Dude, buy a DVD player, there’s one on that shelf for $35, its cheaper than a toaster now.” My manager standing next to me wasnt too happy but the customer reluctantly bought the cheap ass-DVD player.
The ps3 was also one of the cheapest blu-ray players at the time. But I’m pretty sure the 2 launched for 3 or 4 hundred, not 500 or 600 like the ps3 so that probably put a damper on sales. I know I waited for the 40gig $400 ps3 version that gen, and the ps3 price is what made me buy a 360 initially instead.
There was also a pretty aggressive format war between BluRay and HDDVD that tempered demand for a little while. I bought a launch PS3 as well, in part because of BluRay.
I also think it was a time where not everyone had an HD TV, nor did most people see a huge difference between DVD and BluRay, so there just wasn’t quite the demand compared to VHS vs DVD. Aside from the graphical stepup to DVD, it also didn’t need to be rewinded and didn’t take up nearly as much space. I think those two were big selling features, that the DVD to BluRay transition just didn’t have.
All true. I also remembered that I actually bought 2 ps2 as I bought my girlfriend’s mom one for a dvd player for Christmas I think. The vhs to dvd was definitely a bigger jump than to blu-ray.
As someone who moved on from consoles between the Nintendo and the Super Nintendo, the PS2 is the only modern console I’ve ever owned, and it was 90% for the DVD player.
How was your manager not happy with this? You not only talked them into a purchase but a purchase into an ecosystem that would likely generate future revenue for the company. There is nothing but positives here?
Because what looks better on this quarters report selling a $85 VHS player or selling a $35 DVD player?
I think because it was the way I said dude?
interesting, all play stations included but only 2 nintendos, not what i expected, but my relationship with gaming has been a bit tangential, so what i know
You didn’t notice the 360 there? Which tbf had its sales boosted by routinely shitting the bed right after the warranty expired. But also killed sales for future Xbox sales. At least for a chunk of people I played with back then.
i didn’t say there wasn’t any microsoft, my comment was about the sony/nintendo ratio, which is funny, cuz sony started producing consoles because nintendo didn’t follow on a promise






















