Pole is missing the option of "It does and has helped" so I won't vote. early release doesn't help if the system has no games, The Wii U wasted their early start, the rest of your examples are questionable at best, the 360 definitely benefited from the early start.

PS3 selling 95m + at this point? It's probably only going to be on the market for 2 more years (at most) and it hasn't even reached 85m yet so fat chance

I think there's limited relevance in comparing it to it's predecessor since everyone knows the casual audience was gone to apple. Had it not been for such a huge market change outside of Nintendo's control i think expectations for the wiiu would have been far greater in terms of sales. When the wiiu ends up around 30 million units sold I don't think it will be compared at all to the dreamcast. It will be more compared to the N64 or gamecube.

i will be you 1 full year signature and avatar control the PS3 sells more than 88M. 

You are ignoring the fact PS3 has had no price cut in a long time and is still expensive. It has 2 more 50$ price cuts left which will keep it going. 

wii u will do well to get to 20M untis not 30M. 

And it was in Nintys control. Nothing was stopping them being the creators of the iphone. The evolution was from handheld gaming devices to smartphones or tablets. Ninty just weren't as smart as apple and now find them selves in a hard place. 

not if its weaker aka wiiu and dreamcast. Xbox 360 was obviously stronger than sony thought.

the Atari 2600 isnt part of the 3rd generation and the sega master system didnt even exist until the NES came to the west, it was the sega mark 3 who still came later than the famicom in japan.

The mega drive did well and so did the pc engine which you forgot as it could compete with the the SNES but in the end as the snes took advantage of its power . The sega saturn came only some months earlier and we all know how hard it was to programmed for and other mistakes by sega.

It worked for both ps2 and xbox360. You should throw out Sega from this discussion, they have low sales for other obvious reasons.

So basically it has worked 2 out of the past 3 gens.

Depends on the strategy. Worked for XBox and PS in the past as they both tried to break the momentum of previous consoles in the past. It did fail miserably with other consoles such as the Wii U (due to its disastrous launch/campaign/confusing name), and Sega (simply cause they released too early to match the later gens).

Of course it works, if you don't screw up. Let's analyze:

Atari 2600 - Won the gen hands down.

NES - Won hands down. Your data is wrong, it launched before the SMS.

Sega Genesis - Your sales data is incorrect, it was way closer. VGC has wrong data for Genesis. Lauching first allowed them to break Nintendo monopoly and end almost tied.

Sega Saturn - It only launched 4 months before the PS1, and it had a price of US$ 399 while PS1 was already announced at 299. Its launch was botched because they announced it as surprise on E3 and only in some retail stores. The ones that weren't included, like Walmart, were pissed off and even went as far as boycotting Sega consoles forever.

Sega Dreamcast - It launched mid gen, while the PS1 was still too strong. Sega didn't had money to keep it going.

XBOX 360 - It did put MS on the game and stole a lot of market from Sony. MS just didn't (and doesn't) have the brand strength to really win.

Wii U - Stupid controller, weak as hell, no 3rd party support, it just has to many issues to work.

So, launching early helps. PS1 used the time to beat N64, PS2 used it to beat competition, NES did and so on. But if you plan to release a crappy concept, it will fail no matter how many years of advantage you have.

PS1 was only 104 million?? Thought it was much higher than that