The PSX won because Sega and Nintendo (and 3DO) completely dropped the ball on specs, price, launch-date... once it became obvious the incumbents weren't going to deliver everyone latched onto Sony. Similarly MS and Sony have simply handed it to Nintendo this go. Their systems are vastly over-speced and overpriced: they're going after the same hardcore margin of the market while Nintendo grabs the mainstream. MS and Sony became obsessed with topping each other, and believed (wrongly) the market would follow them, while Nintendo played to where the market actually was.

I forgot the whole point of this thread, the hypothesis that the Wii won't be able to sell 80 Million plus consoles for reasons of production limitations. Honestly, I don't know how much the Wii will sell, and 80 Million is a lot. But whether or not it reaches that number won't be because of production issues. We have no idea what Nintendo's long term production plans are, but has any console ever had it's lifetime sales curbed by production issues? probably not

The 360 is still a viable platform because it's userbase is so narrow and easy to sell to: Western and hardcore-gamer. So long as developers pitch games to that narrow market they can hit a critical mass (i.e. anything that's a shooter on the 360 sells gangbusters, anything that's not doesn't sell at all). The PS3, however, I think is doomed. They're stuck with that "killer" price point for the foreseeable future, and it's spread too thin to make seemingly anything profitable except for ports.

My reasoning behind the whole power issue with the Wii: The Wii is targeted to the casual audience, and I believe that it's their major market. Nintendo is going with the "blue ocean" strategy and trying to capture a new audience. They are targeting mainly pre-14 year olds and post 30 year olds. Its a great strategy, as it opens up lots of new people into gaming. However, there is an upper limit (I believe) to the number(s) of casual gamers that will buy the Wii. Partially because I don't see casuals (atleast 50m+ of them) buying into the Wii. If the Wii really sells gangbusters, the PS3 and 360 will addapt with the controller, whereas the Wii cannot addapt graphically to the 360/PS3. Because I believe Nintendo is focusing on the casuals that don't care about graphics or strong gameplay (in terms of typical games), there will be a decent number of American and European gamers that will buy 360s and PS3s, and the majority of these owners will buy the systems in years 3-6. Also, most 3rd parties are still producing normal AAA titles, and typical games and not activity based games (or non-games). Even if you don't want to believe it, theres still a ton of 3rd party games out there that aren't scheduled for the Wii. If software really sells systems, then the Wii has an uphill battle, as it faces DS-like issues attracting new 3rd parties. Yes, tons have already committed, but there are FAR more that need to be attracted to reach anywhere near 60+m units for consoles. Nintendo can do it on handhelds because they always have done it on handhelds (despite the fact the PSP has sold reasonably well).

Some number corrections: - The DS is now 2.5 years old, not 3-4 years. - When comparing historic US data, one should remember inflation and population growth. Ie using 2006 prices the NES was introduced at $374, the SNES at $298, the N64 at $256 and the GC at $227. And concerning population growth, the 34 million units the NES sold in the US between '85 and '95 would be like 40+ million units today because the US population grew from 250 million to 300 million.