I would say the market apparently does not need 3 different competing consoles. Not that it's shrinking exactly in software sales, which is all that matters to the publishers at the end of the day. It simply means 1 or more current 1st parties will need to adjust their business strategy and consider going 3rd party

Same here. I can't see gen 8 outselling gen 6 at this point. The PS4 is selling good but not crazy like the Wii did and I doubt it'll be around as long as the PS2. If I had to guess I'd say: 100m PS4, 50m Xbox One and less than 15m Wii U. That's 165m units. As you said, gen 6 was around 200m units total. 

I agree.

If Xbox doesn't start winning some months, I could see it the marketing "focusing" a lot more.... As that crowd move to PC and ms money stops coming into the industry.

You call it evolution, i call it beeing suckered for more money for less content.

They got more ways to nickle and dime us. But none of it has anything to do with evolution. If anything it went backwards with unfinished releases and games split into parts in order to charge more.

It's a pretty story, but i don't agree at all. All i see is greed, not necessarely anything better.

Makes no sense to think of a console industry. Categorise by game type instead. None of those categories have shrunk as far as I can tell. Casual cheap games have just increased exponentially.

It's good the PS4 isn't selling like the Wii, especially for the reason the Wii was selling.  Why would Sony want to emulate a console that crashed and burned at the end of the gen, having to crawl its way past 100M?  They don't. Not when they can emulate their own console, the PS2, which showed great longevity and sold ~160M consoles.  And like I said, the PS4 is still outpacing it, even without a full $100 pricecut since launch.  And we still have yet to get a PS4 Slim, let alone the Neo.  PS4 is going to around for awhile.

Well, I didn't say the Wii was the only one to do it. I agree that the PS1 and 2 did a good job as well in paving the way and expanding the market to larger audiences. It deserves some of the credit as well. My point really is that gaming should not go back to being 'exclusive' to more focused groups, though I don't think that is really happening at all. There are still many games covering the varying audiences there are now.

And there's nothing really wrong with Ninten's current strategy of bringing in more people into their ecosystem. It's really in a way that benefits them, getting extra goods and deals off of games, enticing them rather than enforcing anything. Seems like a good way to do it to me.

And again to note, I don't mean to say Nintendo is 'special' and the only one. Just one example I listed. There are likely others like you have listed now.

Graphics and marketing is what is jacking the price of gaming. There are too much of people relying on hype rather than research to buy their games.

As Aquamarine pointed out in recent NPD threads, its something like 75% of all 3rd party software sales come from Activision, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Warner Bros & Bethesda.

That's 6 companies that make up 3/4 of the software market which leaves dozens, if not hundreds of companies to fight over the remaining 1/4.

We are seeing the console market become a few massive publishers while the rest fight for scraps. The same goes for genres where shooters/sports/action make up the bulk of software sales and we are also seeing a smaller number of releases with a handful of massive games taking a majority of sales.