"Wii U hardware is on par with current gen consoles"

[Mnementh]

RolStoppable said:

Mnementh said:

I strongly agree to this. Both XBOX360 and PS3 have overtaken SNES and NES in sales. Never before even one 'loser'-console did overtake an older 'winner'-console. The N64 was so far the best-sellign loser-console with 33 million devices. This generation not only one loser-console overtook the older winners, but both of the contenders did it. That's really awesome.

The reasons for this are not so clear. Some may say it's the relatively bad performance of the Wii. But I'm reluctant to call 95 million a bad performance. It may only seem so in comparison to the PS2. Maybe that's the reason. The market was growing, but PS2 totally destroyed the competitors, so they could not profite. This time it's not that clear and all three console-makers benefitting from the increased market.

The Atari 2600 is estimated to have sold 30 million units, so the Nintendo 64 was officially the first loser to beat a previous generation's winner. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive has sold about 29 million units until sometime in 1995, but the system continued to sell for a while longer and Sega never released final lifetime figures for it. So inofficially, there's a good chance that Sega's 16-bit console was actually the first system to do it.

Oh, I forgot about the Atari-era. As vgchartz doesn't offer numbers for these times, I have to trust the numbers you present. That makes my previous statement incorrect, but my point stands, that PS3 and XBOX360 are incredibly successful for consoles that lose in sales to the Wii.

Thanks for your correction and the numbers that are not covered by vgchartz.