Truth be told its not the amount of consoles sold that matters its the amount of profit per console. When you go by that you need to add in total attach rate and subscription services. If you count by number of consoles you have.

1st. Wii

2nd PS3

3rd Xbox 360

Go by Attach rate.

1st. Xbox 360

2nd. Wii

3rd. PS3

Add in additional services such as Xbox Live and I'm actually not sure. Xbox Live alone accounts for over 2 bilion gross revenue per year. Much of that has been reinvested back into the Live service to build up the service and cloud computing (300,000 servers) services but still needs to be taken into consideration.

So 1st this gen profit wise I think is Nintendo with Microsoft second and Sony a distant 3rd.

Thoughts?

A lot of gamers ignored the existence of the Wii to focus on the HD war. Understandable but in the grand scheme of things, its folly in a real argument.

Nintendo losing money on 7th gen? I think you should get your facts right, 7th Gen was Wii and DS for Nintendo two of their biggest hits ever not only they made billions by the huge mark up of the Wii but also from all the peripherals like the Wii Fit board and Mario Kart Wheel.

Wii is the only winner. Ps3 and 360 made both Sony and Ms lose too much money.

"Customers could have easily been confused thinking the Wii was in direct competition with 360 and PS3"

As far as I can tell it wasn't in direct competition... in terms of sales it was a slaughterfest, but I think this was more so accomplished by not directly competing with those systems. Nintendo is the ninja of the industry. I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with a new console in about 3-4 years that put the upcoming consoles to shame.

I agree 100% with you. When I read things like that I always remenber why I barely vistit this place. You can be sure that if the Wii was a Sony console he would be singing a different tune.    

Nintendo generally never looses money and prices their systems at a profit out of the box. I think MS and Sony are taking a page from Nintendo and trying to get close to doing the same this next gen. The $100 price difference is reasonable considering the cost of R&D for the Kinect and the cost on the technology itself but I would venture a guess both systems are close to break even on each console sold unlike previous gens for Sony and Microsoft.

Here, I found this cool website which can answer your question. Right on the front page is a bar graph that shows the current gen leaders for consoles and handhelds. Check it out:

http://www.vgchartz.com/

Where did you get that pokemon t-shirt in your avatar?  I really like it!

I think thread is a social experiment to make more clear and evident which fanbase is the most delusional.

Of course for those of us that have been paying attention, this is less revelation than it is confirmation ...