About this chart race
The PlayStation 2 is number one at all seventeen year-ends, but it has never been safe. It starts at 147.6 million in 2010 and finishes at 160 million, and for ten straight year-ends — 2014 to 2023 — the Nintendo DS sat less than a million units behind it, a gap of 0.98 million that never moved. The DS finally lost second place in 2026, the only change of second place in the whole race, and it lost it to the Nintendo Switch: 10 million units in 2017, 156.59 million in 2026, a rise of 146.6 million that is the biggest climb in the chart by a distance. In 2025 the Switch finished 154.01 million against the DS's 154.02 — ten thousand units apart — and in 2026 it went past the DS and closed to within 3.41 million of the PlayStation 2's record. The PlayStation 4 is the second-fastest riser, from 2.1 million in 2013 to 117.2 million. Four consoles climb into the top ten during the race — Switch, PS4, PS5 and PS3 — and four are pushed out of it: the Game Boy Advance, the PSP, the NES and the SNES. Eight of the twenty entries never move at all, because their sales ended before 2010: the Game Boy on 118.69 million, the original PlayStation on 102.49, the Game Boy Advance on 81.51, the NES on 61.91, the SNES on 49.1, the Nintendo 64 on 32.93, the Atari 2600 on 30 and the original Xbox on 24. The top ten together held 879 million units in 2010 and 1.18 billion in 2026.
This animated ranking shows how units sold changed across 20 series between 2010 and 2026. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2026, PlayStation 2 leads with 160.0.
Included in this race
PlayStation 2, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo DS, Game Boy + Color, PlayStation 4, PlayStation (PS1), Wii, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo NES, Xbox One, Super Nintendo (SNES), Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, Nintendo 64, Atari 2600, Xbox.
Source
Data from Wikipedia — List of best-selling game consoles. Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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