With a first-day sell-through of slightly more than 500,000 units, revenues generated by PlayStation 2 console sales were more than $149 million, meaning that software and peripheral sales on October 26 exceeded $100 million. This number is made even more noteworthy when you consider that it is greater than the total revenue generated by Dreamcast consoles, software, and peripherals all totaled on its first day.
The PlayStation 2's day-one sell-through number (more than 500,000) marks an industry record for the fastest a gaming console has ever sold. Sega's Dreamcast took two weeks to top the same mark, with a total of 514,000 sold-through after its first two weeks of availability, while it took more than two months for Nintendo 64, and more than four months for the original PlayStation, to reach the same numbers.
Sony says that it's still on track to ship an average of about 100,000 PlayStation 2s to retailers each week throughout the rest of this calendar year, with a total shipment of around 1.3 million systems by the end of December. The company is also still on track to ship three million PlayStation 2 units in North America by the end of the fiscal year, March 31, 2001.