A very good read.

Interesting how similar the sales curves of Nintendo systems are though. Almost perfect bell curves peaking in year 3.

It's quite a shame that this thread will quietly slip away while idiotic threads will get hundreds of replies. Nothing useful to contribute, but why not bump it.

I enjoyed reading the whole thing. You made very coherent points that many people just don't seem to be able to quite understand. A week or so I said "Sales always take weird twists" in another post, and it's true. We have no idea what's going to happen. We'll probably look back in 6 years and comment on how foolish we were.

Nintendo isnt THAT important thread is a prime example of this

Keep up the good work, ur one of my favorite posters on this site. Looking forward to ur other projects.

Great Post!

I do not think that we can use past console cycles as a reliable basis for a comparison. There are so many factors that are different and that should be taken into account.

In my opinion the first two years of a console cycle are not really that important... it is the early adopter phase and it is a bad time for the average consumer to buy a new console. You will get a product that is susceptible to technical flaws, you pay the early adopter price and then have a console lying around with almost no great games available (because the great games are being hold back until the install base has grown signifcantly). There is often no real benefit to buy a console on launch. And Nintendo and Sony have already shown that there will be upgraded versions like the slim... There are good reasons to wait for 2 Years before buying a console...

The Wii U will have its most important yea. I am still thinking about buying it but to be honest... it is not the graphics that I have problems with. It is that damn controller that I despise. With the 3DS I can simply turn off that damn 3D and could pretend that it does not exist... The controllers of the Wii/Wii U are simply forced upon me.

Great read, posts like this deserve a temporary sticky at least.
Can't really add anything, so I'm looking forward to your next creative insight.

Excellent post, and a breath of fresh air amongst the hyperbole.

Another reason not to spout off doom/domination right now is that we don't know how the individual companies will fare outside of console sale: Microsoft's new management could well decide to sell off its console division and Sony could go bust.

My apologies, I like to try to interpret graphs for myself rather than read someone else's interpretation, so it was TLDR for me.

From just looking at the US graphs it appears a good predictor for how the generation will play out is launch to following 30th June LTD. For PS2, GC, and XB the order of most to least sales at the 30 June mark was PS2>XB>GC and that's how the generation ended. For 7th gen the 30 June LTD was Wii>XB360>PS3, and effectively at the end of the 7th gen that's the order of things. Yes Xb360 squeaked past Wii just prior to Xb one launchiung, but Xb 360 has been on the market a year longer, and Wii U had been out for a nigh on a year by the time Xb360 overtook Wii. So the 7th generation goes to Wii in the USA during the time that things were a pure 7th generation race.

And Japan, well it's not possible to do a multi-generation trend analysis with the graphs because PS2 is missing (though we know Xb was irrelevant). Perhaps PS2 is buried in the text. GC being the only 6th gen mentioned in the Japan graphs is rather telling and tends to mislead people into directly comparing GC with PS3, which is not at all appropriate. If I have one gripe about the OP it's this. You really need to put the PS2 numbers in there if you want to present the facts objectively. But 7th gen is clear as day, in the debut holidays Wii>PS3>Xb360. I bet dollars to doughnuts the same is true of the 6th gen: PS2>GC>XB in the debut holiday period. But if not then by the following June things were well and truly in that order, sure as eggs.

So folks, mark 30 June in your calendars. The way the 8th generation will play out in USA and Japan will be predictable with reasonable confidence (never certainty of course) when LTDs are known as at that date.

Of course Europe and rest of world is very predictable even now, IMO. And there are no pretty graphs in the OP yet.

RoW current LTDs are: PS4 - 0.45M (1 yr); Xb one 0.19M (1.9 million units. Wii in its launch holidays sold ~700K, OK it launched 9 December so let's give it until end January: >900K. The super dominant Wii in its launch holiday sold 50% of what 360 sold in its first year. PS4 sold >100% of Wii U's first year in 3 weeks, and for every week since it's sold 3:1 or better. Was anyone not predicting Wii to dominate 360 in Europe in January 2007? Wii took 11 months to overtake 360 in Europe. But I think by the end of January 2007 Wii overtaking 360 in Europe was a foregone conclusion. PS4 leaving Wii U in the dust in Europe is a very likely scenario.
There's little evidence to suggest Xb one is going to take out PS4 this generation. Xb one can compete in the UK, it's sales are reasonable, but I'm thinking 30 June 2014 in UK will show PS4 pretty well in the lead, barring some sort of disaster. And PS4 can pretty much phone in the rest of Europe vs. Xb one, or at least every other market that matters numerically speaking.

Is Wii U doomination in USA not a sure thing? If you squint at the numbers sure Wii U has a shot at seriously competing in the USA.
Is Wii U doomination in Japan a serious consideration? No, at least not relative to PS4. At this stage one could see Wii U and PS4 being close, given that PS4 is more likely to sell like Wii U and PS3 than to sell like PS2 and Wii. But the fact that Wii U AND PS4 might sell like PS3 is actually relative doomination for home consoles in Japan as a whole.
Is Wii U doomination in Europe and RoW likely? I'm afraid so, yes, things are not looking good there.

Is Xb one doomination or domination likely in the USA? No, neither scenario is likely.
Is Xb one doomination in Japan likely? This is the most certain prediction one can make.
Is Xb one doomination likely in Europe and RoW? Perhaps not doomination, but I think Xb one will not perform well. the possibility of domination isn't a serious prospect, given the history with PS3 and PS2

Is PS4 domination in the USA likely? (I'm not asking doomination because who is seriously suggesting PS4 doomination anywhere after the last 8 weeks?) Possible, but Xb one is right there and could be outselling PS4 on a weekly basis as I write, and Wii U is hanging on.
Is PS4 domination in Europe and RoW likely? Yes very likely if you consider the unprecedented situation relative to its immediate competition. And for RoW taking into consideration the aforementioned observation that PS3 is number 2 home console of all time for the RoW countries predicting anything other than PS4 domination seems rather naive.
Is PS4 domination likely in Japan? Again possible but here is where Wii U's current numbers suggest Wii U will compete. It may end up being behind PS4, but possibly not by all that much.

On aggregate though the global picture and history suggests PS4 domination. If PS4 doesn't dominate in USA and Japan it will be close enough that the determining factors will be Europe and RoW. And there PS4's dominance seems very likely.

Is there a reason the OP neglected to consider Europe and RoW, other than the fact that the OP would really have become TTLDR and even the most dedicated reader would have lost heart half way through? Benefit of the doubt to the OP I guess.

Sorry, I just did a TLDR and didn't even use pretty graphs. But then again I typed this in under an hour.

Holiday sales are always good and actually they don´t mean much.... the fact is that 2014 is a key year for all the home console business. Consoles in general are selling less and less since 2010 and many developers either have gone bankrupt or have changed their development strategies. It´s still early to say, but the future does not seems bright.