Jim Ryan claims that PS2 sold more than 160 million units - is this true?

As of today, April 1, Jim Ryan is no longer officially part of the PlayStation top brass. The former CEO of the Sony company said goodbye to gamers in a podcast on the PlayStation Blog where they reviewed Ryan's entire career within the company: more than 30 years, from the first Sony PlayStation offices in Europe right after the launch of the first model, right up to the present day.

A history of the medium, no doubt, but which has left a rather surprising note as an epilogue: Ryan maintains that PS2 (the best-selling console in history) sold 160 million and not 155 million, as the official figures from Sony itself (whose latest data on this hardware date from 2012) claim. But are these figures real, or did Ryan want to take advantage of them to generate one last media flurry? It's hard to say, although user ZhugeEX of Nico Partners has done a fairly detailed investigation into the matter in a thread on X /Twitter.

The key point of the research is that nine months have passed since the last official data and the discontinuation of PlayStation 2 (until January 2013). It is also weighted based on official PS3 distribution data during those first months of coexistence. The estimate suggests that PlayStation 2, in the absence of official figures beyond Ryan's words, was indeed able to reach 159.1 million, significantly widening the gap with Nintendo DS and setting a new target for Nintendo Switch, which had hoped to claim the top spot by 2024.

What do you think, is Jim Ryan telling the truth?