| Cerebralbore101 said: I still love the "phones killed portables" assumption. DS sales were explosive and unrepeatable in the same manner that PS2 sales were explosive and unrepeatable. A PS3 with no Blu-Ray, a standardized CPU, and a $400 price point wouldn't have sold as much as the PS2. A 2DS XL launching at $170 in 2011 with good first party games would never have gotten near DS lifetime sales.
Vita was a train wreck on just about every level. It was the Wii U of handhelds. Many PSP/Vita customers were never going to switch over to Nintendo for portable gaming. Those PSP/Vita gamers wanted portable FPS and console style adventure games. 3DS was never going to have those. (Part of Switch's success is that it does offer those type of games, and that has in turn brought much of the Vita/PSP crowd to the system.) So you can't just point to the total handheld lifetime sales of Vita + 3DS and go "See you guys the market shrank from 230 million with DS/PSP to 93 million with Vita/3DS! " The bolded statement above is just as dumb as Pachter's "Oh hey you guys Wii + 360 + PS3 lifetime sales is more than Wii U + XB1 + PS4 lifetimes sales! Therefore the console market is shrinking!" Pachter fails to take into account the fact that there was less of a reason to own both HD Twins in the PS4/XB1 era due to PS4 being able to play virtually all the games XB1 had and vastly more. There's a huge 30-40 game gap in the XB1 to PS4 libraries when it comes to games rated at 80% or higher on Opencritic. This gap is in PS4's favor. 360 on the other hand went toe to toe with PS3 in terms of exclusives and 3rd party support. Now that XB1 lacks enough exclusives and 3rd party support to compete most people just stopped buying both an MS and a PS system, because there was no need. Anyway you can't just "bean counter" it up and go "oh see this gen is losing to last gen!" Those are the same people that point out that 3DS + Wii U is currently beating Switch lifetime sales, without taking into account that many people owned both a 3DS and a Wii U, (for the purposes of having access to all Nintendo games) but nobody needs to own two Switches to play all Nintendo games.
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Going from ~230M to ~90M isn't something to scoff at. That's a deficit of 140M units. Even if you say the DS can't be matched, the 3DS should have been able to do 100M+, especially without any real strong competition. There should have been room for the Vita to do at least 40M-50M, too. Just like the PS2 may not be matched ever, but the PS4 is going to most likely hit 115M-120M+. There's just no way around it, the dedicated HH market shrank drastically with the growth in mobile gaming. Both Sony and Nintendo know this, so took action. Sony focused on their home console business. Nintendo came out with a hybrid that can be a handheld and a home console, and is something they can put their full attention into.
As for consoles, the Wii+360+PS3 can be explained because the Wii brought in a ton of casuals that never really gamed before. They left the market once the motion control fad died. And there was quite a bit of crossover buying, thanks to the Wii being a secondary console to many who had a PS3 or 360. While I guess you can say it shrank because those casuals who are counted in the total left, the core gamers are still here in great numbers. If you compare the PS2+Xbox+GC (~200M) with where the PS4+XBO+Wii U is going to end up (~185M-~195M), the numbers are mostly the same.
