Shadow1980 said:
I'm not directly comparing the PS3's situation and the Wii U's situation. They faced different obstacles. The PS3 had to deal with a high price, a later start than the 360, the surprise success of the Wii, and, to a lesser extent, a lack of compelling exclusives, while the Wii U was having to deal with minimal advertising as well as the single worst game drought faced by a mainstream system (people buy Nintendo systems mainly for Nintendo games, which the Wii U had none, while the PS3 was able to rely on third-party sales). However, I am using the PS3 (and every other system) to illustrate that simplistic "System A is selling at x% of System B" analyses are woefully naive. We don't know if the Wii U's 2014 baseline will improve over 2013's, or if big games like Mario Kart 8 will boost sales, or what have you. It could rebound, or it could continue to fall flat. I think with more games that people buy Nintendo systems to play, lower price & better bundles, and heavier advertising, it could do a lot better this year, while others think that not even that will be enough. Both are reasonable guesses.
Also, comparing the Wii U to the Dreamcast is even more baseless than comparing it to the GameCube. With the Dreamcast, Sega was coming off of the Saturn, which was a failure everywhere but Japan (where it still only did okay), plus Sega had nothing to fall back on. While the Dreamcast did rather well early on, Sega decided to cut their losses in the face of the juggernaut that was the PS2 and withdraw from the hardware market. We don't know how much it would have sold had Sega been willing and able to continue onward. Meanwhile, Nintendo is coming off of the success of the Wii, plus they have their successful handhelds division. They've amassed a ton of cash from the DS and Wii, and the 3DS is selling very well. Ergo, Nintendo has no reason to withdraw from the hardware market like Sega did, and thus the Wii U won't face the same fate as the Dreamcast. Unless it has a catastrophic 2014 and doesn't recover, it will almost certainly sell more than 10 million units, and it won't be discontinued anytime soon.
Oh, I have no doubts that the PS4 will be the sales leader. However, any projections of lifetime sales are just guesses. Just because it had a record launch doesn't entail that it will go on to outsell the PS2. I think it could sell close to PS2 numbers, but there's no way of knowing what its long-term sales curve will look like (i.e., how fast it will grow prior to peaking, when it will peak, and how fast it will decline after peaking). It could continue to trend ahead of the PS3 or even the PS2 for several years, but could taper off much quicker and end up selling only 120 million. Or it could go on untold heights and sell 200 million units. Or its sales curve might be different from the PS2's but have the same endpoint of 150-160 million. Or it might only marginally outsell the PS3 for any of a number of reasons (such as bombing in Japan). We just don't know. With the system being only two months old and all the various factors that cause systems to sell what they do (supply constraints, demand-influencing factors like price, games, etc., and perhaps various other things), we can't make any projections with any degree of confidence. It's all very rough guesswork. As the years go by, we might be able to make predictions of its lifetime sales with greater confidence, but even then it's something you have to take week by week, month by month, and year by year.
|
Currently Online 
