Sony’s PlayStation 4 has become one of the top-selling consoles of recent times. At the Sony Gamescom press conference last week Jim Ryan, President & CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, revealed that PS4 sales have crossed a staggering 10 million units. According to Polygon in April earlier this year, Sony had stated sales of 7 million units. A much more interesting figure, however, has to be the sale of one million units sold on the first day the PlayStation 4 came to market – 15th November, 2013.

The PS4 is not even a year-old yet, and we can only imagine how high that figure will be come November 2014. But in spite of record sales, it appears executives at Sony are a bit worried by the gargantuan success of their latest generation console.

Shuhei Yoshida, Sony’s Head of Worldwide Studios was quoted telling Eurogamer, “It’s just beyond our imagination. We are so happy. But I for one am a bit nervous because we do not completely understand what’s happening. You need to understand why your products are selling well so you can plan for the future, right? It defied the conventional thinking. Lots of people thought the dedicated game hardware might not be needed going forward, but still lots of people are very excited”.

Sony’s focus from the beginning was to deliver a gaming console for gamers – a throwback to the 90’s when consoles were used for the sole purpose of gaming. The hardware was designed from the ground-up to provide the best gaming experience available today. It is eight times as powerful as its predecessor the PS3, and was designed to be more developer-friendly in a possible bid to land more exclusive titles.

Bearing this notion in mind one has to ask the question, are most consumers of this product hardcore gamers? Sony’s internal reports claim that most buyers of the PS4 had not previously owned a PS3. This wasn’t a difficult statistic to measure considering the PSN account information of individuals playing PS4 will indicate if he/she has ever owned another PlayStation console.

But it still doesn’t explain why units are selling so fast? According to ars technica, Yoshida has asked journalists and marketing professionals to help him find out…

“If we sell this number of units, there are no more consumers we can sell to. That’s a really terrifying prospect. So we want to understand who are these consumers who we do not necessarily consider core gamers, who are purchasing PS4, and why they are doing it and what they are doing with PS4, so we can create a bit more of a positive future, rather than saying, wow, we have sold to every single core gamer,” he added.